On August 21, 2004, thirteen military-grade grenades were thrown into a crowd of 20,000 people. The weapon used — the Arges grenade — is not available in any bazaar, cannot be purchased, and is not manufactured in Bangladesh. Its presence on a Dhaka street, in the hands of militants, tells you something. What it tells you is this: somewhere in the chain between its manufacture and its detonation, the state was involved. This piece follows that chain.
Start with what an Arges grenade actually is.
The Arges grenade is a hand grenade manufactured by Argeswerke GmbH, an Austrian defense contractor. It was developed for military application — not police use, not riot control, not civilian self-defense. It is designed to kill people in combat. The fragmentation radius is lethal. The manufacturing standards are military-specification. You do not buy one at a hardware store. You do not acquire one through ordinary criminal channels. The supply chain for Arges grenades runs through military procurement: government-to-government arms transfers, licensed military suppliers, state intelligence services.
That is the starting point. Everything else follows from it.
On August 21, 2004, at 5:22 in the afternoon, Mufti Abdul Hannan — chief of Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami Bangladesh, known as HuJI — handed fifteen Arges grenades to a twelve-man attack team assembled outside Golap Shah Mazar in Dhaka. The team had already prayed together and had lunch. A religious sermon had been delivered. The code name for what they were about to do was “Sheikh Hasina Ke Nashta Korano” — “Light Snacks for Sheikh Hasina.” They walked to positions around a rally on Bangabandhu Avenue where 20,000 people had gathered.
At 5:22 PM, Abu Jandal threw the first grenade. Twelve more followed. Twenty-four people died. More than five hundred were injured. Sheikh Hasina survived with permanent hearing damage she carries to this day.
Where did fifteen military-grade Austrian grenades come from?
The Supply Chain
The answer came not from the BNP government, which spent two years fabricating an alternative story about a pickpocket named Joj Mia. It came from Abdul Majed Bhat, also known as Yusuf Bhat — a Pakistani militant who was among those eventually arrested and tried. In his confessional statement, Bhat identified the source.
The grenades originated with Muzaffar Ahmad Shah, an operative of Tehrik-e-Jihad Islami, a Pakistan-based militant organization known as TEJI. Shah provided the grenades to Maulana Tajuddin — a Bangladeshi militant who was also the brother of BNP politician Abdus Salam Pintu, then serving as Deputy Minister for Education in Khaleda Zia’s cabinet. The grenades were originally intended for transfer to Indian militant groups active in the northeast. Tajuddin kept them instead.
They then passed from Tajuddin to Mufti Hannan. From Hannan to the twelve-man team. From the team to the crowd of 20,000.
So the supply chain runs: Pakistani militant network → BNP deputy minister’s brother → HuJI chief → political rally. Every link in that chain was connected, in some way, to the political apparatus of the government in power. Tajuddin was Pintu’s brother. Pintu was a minister. The attack was carried out at a rally of the opposition.
This is not circumstantial. The trial court’s 2018 verdict found it proven beyond reasonable doubt. Judge Shahed Nuruddin, presiding over the Speedy Trial Tribunal-1, made the state connection explicit: “The specialised deadly Arges grenades that are used in wars were blasted at the Awami League’s central office on 23 Bangabandhu Avenue in broad daylight with the help of the then state machinery.”
With the help of the then state machinery. A judge. A verdict. Not an opposition accusation, not a political speech, not a newspaper editorial. A formal finding of fact in a court of law.
What the State Did Before the Attack
The chain of command established in the 2018 verdict goes significantly higher than Maulana Tajuddin. Planning meetings were held at Hawa Bhaban — the political office of Tarique Rahman, son of Prime Minister Khaleda Zia and the de facto power center of the BNP government. The attendees at those meetings, as established by the verdict, included:
Tarique Rahman, convicted in absentia and sentenced to life imprisonment. His political office was the venue. His political network was the organizing infrastructure.
Lutfozzaman Babar, State Minister for Home Affairs. He had direct authority over Bangladesh Police, the intelligence services, and the security apparatus. He provided government backing. He assured the HuJI operatives of administrative support. Sentenced to death.
Harris Chowdhury, Political Secretary to Prime Minister Khaleda Zia. Present at planning meetings at Hawa Bhaban. Sentenced to life imprisonment.
Brigadier General Abdur Rahim, Director General of the National Security Intelligence (NSI). Participated in planning. Sentenced to death.
Brigadier General Rezzaqul Haider Chowdhury, Director General of the DGFI — the Directorate General of Forces Intelligence, Bangladesh’s military intelligence agency. Participated in planning. Sentenced to death.
Ali Ahsan Mohammad Mojaheed, Secretary General of Jamaat-e-Islami and Social Welfare Minister. Participated in planning meetings. Later executed for 1971 war crimes in a separate case.
Let that list settle for a moment. The Home Minister. The PM’s political secretary. The heads of both the civilian and military intelligence services. All found, by a court, to have been in the room when the murder of an opposition leader was planned.
The grenades did not arrive in Bangladesh through some invisible underground channel. Military-grade weapons travel through state-accessible networks. The people who planned the attack ran the state. The correlation is not accidental.
What the State Did After the Attack
If there were any doubt about state involvement, the government’s actions after August 21, 2004 remove it. Nobody innocent behaves the way this government behaved.
Within hours, police — who answer to the Home Ministry, which is to say Lutfozzaman Babar — fired tear gas and charged batons against Awami League members who were trying to rescue the wounded from the blast site. Not at the attackers, who were long gone. At the victims and their helpers.
The crime scene was washed with water and detergent. Evidence was destroyed. Recovered intact grenades, which should have been preserved as forensic exhibits, were deliberately destroyed rather than sent for analysis. Police refused to register any criminal complaint filed by the Awami League — the party whose rally had just been attacked, whose members were still dying in hospitals. Only a general diary was filed. Not a case. A diary entry.
The bodies of victims were initially withheld. The government refused to hand them over.
Then came the fabrication. The Crime Investigation Department — again, operating under the Home Ministry, which is to say under Babar — constructed a false narrative. They identified one Joj Mia, a petty criminal from Noakhali with no connection to the attack, as the perpetrator. On June 10, 2005 — ten months after the attack — Joj Mia was arrested from his home. On June 26, 2005, under torture, he gave a false confession under Section 164 before a magistrate implicating a criminal gang called the Seven Star Group.
The confession was fabricated. The story collapsed when journalists and legal observers found its internal contradictions. Joj Mia had been coerced into confessing to a mass murder he had no knowledge of, to protect the people who actually planned it.
A second victim, Shaibal Saha Partha, was also arrested, tortured in custody, and forced to give a false confessional statement. He was eventually released. He still suffers from post-traumatic stress.
The government’s one-man judicial commission — headed by Justice Joynal Abedin, who was subsequently elevated to the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court in what The Daily Star described as a reward for his services — produced a report blaming the attack on “foreign and local enemies.” No specifics. No names. A report designed to produce nothing. Which is exactly what it produced.
For two full years, from August 2004 to January 2007, the BNP government ensured that the real perpetrators were never charged, never investigated, and in fact actively protected while innocent people were tortured into false confessions.
What the Real Investigation Found
It took 1/11 — the emergency and the caretaker government — to produce a real investigation. In November 2007, Mufti Abdul Hannan, by then arrested, revealed the truth for the first time: HuJI carried out the attack. Maulana Tajuddin was the liaison. The support came from the political leadership of the BNP government.
The FBI and Interpol both provided technical assistance to the investigation. US President George W. Bush had expressed “shock” through Secretary of State Colin Powell immediately after the attack. The UK, Netherlands, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, and Sweden all condemned it. International forensic and intelligence resources were brought to bear.
By 2011, Mufti Hannan had given a detailed confessional statement naming Tarique Rahman, Lutfozzaman Babar, Harris Chowdhury, Abdus Salam Pintu, and Kazi Shah Mofazzal Hossain Kaikobad, as well as senior officials of the Home Ministry, Police, DGFI, NSI, and the Prime Minister’s Office.
The charge sheet eventually named 52 accused. The case went to trial. In October 2018, 19 people were sentenced to death and 19 to life imprisonment for the murder of 24 people on August 21, 2004.
It had taken fourteen years from the day of the attack to reach a verdict.
The Rooftops Were Cleared
One detail from the trial record deserves particular attention, because it captures the depth of state complicity more precisely than any individual name or rank.
At Awami League rallies, the party’s security volunteers — the Sechchasebak and Chhatra League — customarily secured the rooftops of buildings overlooking the venue. This is standard crowd protection practice. On August 21, 2004, they were specifically denied access. The rooftops were closed to AL security personnel.
The twelve HuJI operatives took positions on those rooftops.
Someone cleared those rooftops. Someone told AL’s security volunteers they could not access them. That decision required authority over the buildings and their security arrangements. It required coordination between whoever managed venue security and whoever was planning the attack. It is not something that happens by accident.
The Arges grenades were military-grade weapons from a military supply chain. The rooftops were cleared. The crime scene was washed. The investigation was killed. The witnesses were tortured. The commission produced nothing. The real investigators were blocked for two years.
These are not the actions of a government that had nothing to do with what happened.
The Acquittals
On December 1, 2024, the High Court of Bangladesh acquitted all 49 accused in the August 21 grenade attack case. Every person convicted of the murder of 24 people walked free. Tarique Rahman, convicted to life imprisonment. Lutfozzaman Babar, sentenced to death. Brigadier General Abdur Rahim, sentenced to death. Brigadier General Rezzaqul Haider Chowdhury, sentenced to death. All acquitted.
On September 4, 2025, the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court dismissed a petition for retrial. The acquittals were final.
The speed and totality of the reversals were remarkable. The High Court did not distinguish between individuals. It did not identify weaknesses in specific charges while upholding others. It acquitted everyone, simultaneously, within weeks of the BNP-aligned political transformation following July 2024. The pattern was not subtle.
This is not a critique of courts in general. Courts make errors. Evidence is weighed differently by different judges. Appeals exist for good reasons. But what happened to the August 21 case was not careful judicial re-examination. It was mass acquittal in a politically transformed environment, of people connected to the party now in power, at a speed that allows no other interpretation.
The judge in 2018 found that military-grade grenades were detonated in a civilian crowd “with the help of the then state machinery.” The High Court in 2024 found that nobody was responsible for any of it. One of these findings is correct. They cannot both be.
Why It Matters That He Is Prime Minister Now
Tarique Rahman is the current Prime Minister of Bangladesh. He was convicted in 2018 of participating in the planning of the attack that killed 24 people and injured more than 500 others. He was acquitted in 2024. He returned to Bangladesh in late 2025. He won the 2026 general election and was sworn in as Prime Minister on February 17, 2026.
The people now running Bangladesh include those who, per a 2018 court verdict, planned a mass murder in 2004, covered it up for two years, tortured false witnesses, laundered military-grade weapons through a jihadi network, and used the state machinery of law enforcement and intelligence to protect perpetrators and prosecute investigators.
The grenades did not appear from nowhere. They were Austrian military-specification weapons that passed through a Pakistani militant network to the brother of a BNP minister before reaching the hands of a jihadi chief who distributed them to a twelve-man death squad. The planning happened in the ruling party’s political office. The state’s intelligence chiefs were in the room. The Home Minister ran the cover-up.
None of this is allegation. None of it is opposition propaganda. It is the finding of a Bangladeshi court, in a proceeding that took more than a decade, with 52 accused and testimony from dozens of witnesses including the confessions of the organizers themselves.
That court’s verdict was reversed. The records, however, have not been erased. The confessions exist. The forensic evidence exists. The testimonies exist. The judge’s words exist: “specialised deadly Arges grenades that are used in wars were blasted at the Awami League’s central office on 23 Bangabandhu Avenue in broad daylight with the help of the then state machinery.”
Fourteen years after the attack. Six years after the verdict. The weapons have been accounted for. The supply chain has been traced. The planning has been documented. The cover-up has been reconstructed. The verdict has been reversed.
But the grenades still fell. The 24 still died. The five hundred still bled on a Dhaka street on a Saturday afternoon in August 2004.
Acquittals do not bring them back. They do not undo what happened. They do not change what the grenades were, where they came from, or who cleared the rooftops so they could be thrown.
That is the record. It has not been retried. It has only been buried.
Sources: Dhaka Speedy Trial Tribunal-1 verdict, October 10, 2018 (Judge Shahed Nuruddin); confessional statements of Abdul Majed Bhat, Mufti Abdul Hannan (2007 and 2011); CID supplementary charge sheet, July 2011; High Court acquittal order, December 1, 2024; Supreme Court dismissal of retrial petition, September 4, 2025; The Daily Star coverage of August 21, 2004 and subsequent investigation; AFP reporting on the verdict; US State Department statements (Colin Powell, August 2004); International condemnation statements (UK, Netherlands, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Sweden); FBI and Interpol technical assistance records; Wikipedia documentation of the August 21, 2004 grenade attack.
Leave a Reply