She survived the initial blast. That made it worse.
On the afternoon of August 21, 2004, thirteen grenades were thrown into a crowd of thousands at the Awami League’s central office in Dhaka. Sixteen people died on the spot. Their deaths were immediate — final, at least, in that sense. The shrapnel did not wait.
Ivy Rahman was not that lucky.
She was the Awami League’s Women’s Affairs Secretary. She was 58 years old. She was standing near the stage when the grenades hit. She took serious shrapnel wounds to the body. She was rushed to hospital. She held on for seventy-two hours — three days — before she died on the morning of August 24, 2004.
Those seventy-two hours matter. Not because they were unusual in a country where hospitals are crowded and victims sometimes linger. But because of what happened during them.
While Ivy Rahman was fighting for her life in that hospital bed, the government of Bangladesh — the same government whose ministers would later be convicted of ordering the attack — was busy destroying the evidence that might have held them accountable.
Who She Was
Jebun Nahar Ivy. That was her full name. She went by Ivy — Ivy Rahman after her marriage to Zillur Rahman, a senior Awami League leader who would later become the President of Bangladesh.
She had spent decades in the Awami League’s women’s wing. Not as a figurehead. Not as a placeholder name on a committee. As a working politician who showed up, organized, spoke, and fought. By 2004 she had risen to serve as the party’s Women’s Affairs Secretary — one of the most senior positions a woman could hold in Bangladeshi party politics at the time.
On August 21 she was there for a reason: the Awami League was holding a rally at 23 Bangabandhu Avenue to protest a string of bomb attacks targeting Awami League leaders across the country. It was meant to be a show of defiance. A public statement that the opposition would not be silenced by fear.
What happened instead became the single deadliest political attack in Bangladesh’s history.
5:22 PM, August 21, 2004
Sheikh Hasina had just finished speaking. The crowd was dense — thousands of people packed into the street in front of the party office. It was an ordinary Saturday afternoon in Dhaka.
Then the grenades started landing.
Thirteen grenades in total. Thrown from rooftop positions by a twelve-man attack team. Military-grade Arges grenades — the kind used in wars, not available in any civilian market in Bangladesh. Each one was designed to kill.
The blasts tore through the crowd in seconds. Sixteen people died where they stood. Sheikh Hasina’s bodyguard, Mahbubur Rahman, positioned himself between the explosion and his principal. He absorbed the shrapnel. He died. Hasina survived — but with permanent hearing damage she carries to this day.
Over five hundred people were injured. Dozens critically.
Ivy Rahman was among them. She had been close to the stage. The shrapnel found her.
While She Was Still Alive: The Cover-Up Begins
Here is the part of this story that demands to be said plainly:
Ivy Rahman did not die immediately. She spent three days in hospital. And during those three days, the Bangladesh government — led by Prime Minister Khaleda Zia, whose son Tarique Rahman would later be convicted of planning the attack — did not investigate. They destroyed.
The crime scene was washed with water and detergent.
Hours after the attack. While the injured were still in surgery. While people like Ivy Rahman were in intensive care. Government-directed personnel washed 23 Bangabandhu Avenue, removing blood, removing fragments, removing any forensic evidence that might point to who had done this and who had helped them.
Grenades that were recovered intact — four of the thirteen did not detonate — were deliberately destroyed rather than preserved as evidence. The Supreme Court Bar Association later called this exactly what it was: systematic destruction of evidence. A cover-up operation conducted by the state.
Police refused to register any criminal case.
The Awami League filed cases. Police refused to accept them. They accepted a general diary entry — the most minimal possible procedural acknowledgment, equivalent to recording that something happened without committing to investigate what. The message from the BNP government was unambiguous: this case will not be investigated on your terms.
No minister visited the hospitals.
Not one BNP minister went to see the injured in those first days. Not to express condolences. Not to demonstrate the government’s concern for victims of political violence on its watch. Nothing. The ruling party treated the aftermath of the deadliest political attack in Bangladesh’s history as a problem to be managed, not a tragedy to be acknowledged.
Ivy Rahman died on August 24. She died while all of this was happening around her.
The Fabrication: “Joj Mia Did It”
With the crime scene sanitized and the real investigation blocked, the BNP government needed a story. So they invented one.
The Crime Investigation Department — under a government that had already signaled its intentions by washing away the evidence — produced a theory: the attack had been carried out by Joj Mia (also known as Jamal Ahmed), a petty criminal from Noakhali, along with fourteen members of a gang called the Seven Star Group led by someone named Subrata Bain. They had allegedly met in Moghbazar and rehearsed on a remote island before the attack.
On June 10, 2005 — nearly a year after Ivy Rahman’s death — Joj Mia was arrested from his home. On June 26, under what investigators would later document as torture in custody, he gave a confessional statement under Section 164 implicating the Seven Star Group.
The story had one problem: it was entirely false.
Shaibal Saha Partha, another person arrested and implicated by the same investigation, was also tortured into giving a false confessional statement. He was eventually released. He still carries the psychological damage from his time in custody — arrested for a crime he had nothing to do with, tortured by a state apparatus that needed a scapegoat.
Simultaneously, the government commissioned a one-man judicial probe. Justice Joynal Abedin was appointed to investigate. His commission produced a report blaming the attack on unnamed “foreign and local enemies.” It named no planners. It identified no chain of command. It reached no conclusions that could lead to any prosecution of anyone who actually mattered.
Two years later, Justice Joynal Abedin was elevated to the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court.
The Daily Star later called his elevation a “shame” for the judiciary of Bangladesh. That is a precise description.
The Truth That Emerged After 1/11
The BNP government fell on January 11, 2007 — a military-backed caretaker government took power in what became known as 1/11. A new CID investigation was ordered. This time, investigators were not operating under the oversight of the people who had ordered the attack.
In November 2007, Mufti Abdul Hannan — the chief of Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami (HuJI), who had been arrested by the BNP government in 2005 but deliberately never linked to the August 21 case — made his confession. He described in detail how the attack had been organized. He named names.
The planning meetings had taken place at Hawa Bhaban — the Gulshan office from which Tarique Rahman, Khaleda Zia’s son and the de facto power center of the BNP government, ran what was effectively a parallel government. Mufti Hannan identified Lutfozzaman Babar, then State Minister for Home Affairs, as having provided the government and security apparatus backing that made the attack possible. He identified Abdus Salam Pintu, Deputy Minister for Education, whose brother Maulana Tajuddin was the key liaison between BNP and HuJI.
He named Harris Chowdhury, Khaleda Zia’s political secretary. He named senior officials of the Home Ministry, police, the Directorate General of Forces Intelligence (DGFI), and National Security Intelligence (NSI).
And he named Tarique Rahman.
The grenades themselves — military-grade Arges grenades, war weapons — had come from Pakistan through a chain involving Tehrik-e-Jihad Islami operatives. They were not available in Bangladeshi markets. They were military ordnance that had been moved through channels that required state complicity to function.
Ivy Rahman was killed with a military weapon that traveled from Pakistan to Dhaka specifically to kill the Awami League leadership at that rally.
The 2018 Verdict: 49 Convicted, 19 Sentenced to Death
On October 10, 2018 — fourteen years after the attack, fourteen years after Ivy Rahman’s death — the Speedy Trial Tribunal-1 in Dhaka delivered its verdict. Judge Shahed Nuruddin’s finding was unambiguous:
“The attack was a well-orchestrated plan, executed through abuse of state power.”
Nineteen people were sentenced to death. They included Lutfozzaman Babar, former State Minister for Home Affairs. They included Abdus Salam Pintu, former Deputy Minister for Education. They included Brigadier General (Retd) Abdur Rahim, former Director General of National Security Intelligence. They included Brigadier General (Retd) Rezzaqul Haider Chowdhury, former Director General of DGFI. They included Maulana Tajuddin, the man who linked the politicians to the killers.
Nineteen more were sentenced to life imprisonment. That list included Tarique Rahman — BNP acting chairman, son of Khaleda Zia, the man convicted of planning the attack that killed Ivy Rahman and twenty-three others. Harris Chowdhury, Khaleda Zia’s political secretary, was sentenced to life. So were several BNP lawmakers who had facilitated meetings between the party leadership and HuJI operatives.
Former Inspector Generals of Police — Ashraful Huda and Shahudul Haque — were sentenced to two years each for harbouring offenders. The officers who had fabricated the “Joj Mia” story, the policemen who had misled the investigation, received four and two-year sentences respectively.
All 38 people sentenced to death or life imprisonment were also found guilty of grievously injuring the attack’s victims and given additional twenty-year sentences to run concurrently.
Ivy Rahman’s death was acknowledged in court. The grenade attack that took her life three days after it reached her body was proven, beyond reasonable doubt, to have been ordered by the ruling government of Bangladesh at the time.
Her husband Zillur Rahman had become President of Bangladesh in 2009. He died in office in 2013. He never saw a final justice delivered for his wife’s killing.
December 2024: All 49 Walk Free
In July 2024, the student-led uprising ousted the Awami League government. By August, the political landscape of Bangladesh had been transformed. By late 2024, the judiciary was being reconstituted under the new political order.
In December 2024, a reconstituted High Court acquitted all 49 individuals convicted in the August 21 case. All of them. Including Tarique Rahman. Including Lutfozzaman Babar, who had been sentenced to death. Including every police officer and intelligence official who had been found guilty of faciliting the massacre or covering it up afterward.
In September 2025, the Supreme Court of Bangladesh upheld the acquittal.
Forty-nine convictions, established over fourteen years of investigation and trial, with confessional statements and documentary evidence and witness testimony — all of it annulled. The reasoning of the courts was not examined in public detail. The process moved quickly. The outcome was complete.
Tarique Rahman is now the Prime Minister of Bangladesh.
What This Means for Ivy Rahman
There is a particular cruelty in the arc of this story.
Ivy Rahman spent her life in politics. She understood that politics in Bangladesh was dangerous work. She was standing at a rally to protest political violence when political violence found her. She survived the initial blast. She held on for three days — long enough, perhaps, for some part of her to understand what was happening in the world outside her hospital room.
And now, twenty-two years after her death, the man convicted of ordering the grenades that killed her is the head of government of Bangladesh. The men convicted of supplying state resources to make the attack possible have been acquitted. The cover-up that was conducted while she lay dying — the washing of the crime scene, the destruction of evidence, the fabrication of the “Joj Mia” narrative — has been rendered moot by the erasure of every conviction it was designed to prevent.
The one-man commission that produced a report clearing the actual perpetrators. The justice who wrote that report and was rewarded with a Supreme Court elevation. The pattern that ran through every phase of the aftermath: protect the principals, sacrifice the expendable, make the evidence disappear.
That pattern won.
The Numbers That Should Not Fade
Twenty-four people died in the August 21, 2004 grenade attack.
More than five hundred were injured — some permanently disabled, some carrying shrapnel in their bodies to this day.
Sheikh Hasina suffered permanent hearing damage that has never fully healed.
Ivy Rahman survived seventy-two hours and then died. She was fifty-eight years old. She had spent decades in the service of the Awami League and the women’s movement within it. She had a husband who loved her and would go on to lead the country she helped build — but not with her beside him.
The grenades that killed her were military weapons. They required state connections to procure. They were thrown by men who had been recruited, organized, and equipped with the knowledge and backing of people operating from the ruling party’s power center.
This was not a random act of political violence. It was an assassination operation conducted by the government of Bangladesh against the opposition. Twenty-four people died. One of them was Ivy Rahman.
She held on for three days.
Bangladesh should remember those three days. And remember what was done during them — and after them — by the people who ordered her killing, and by the system that ultimately let them go.
This article is part of Series 4: The Victims — profiles of the people killed, injured, and erased in the course of Bangladesh’s documented history of political violence from 2001–2006. Sources include the 2018 verdict of Speedy Trial Tribunal-1 (Case No. 01/2008), CID investigation records, Dhaka Tribune, The Daily Star, and bdnews24 contemporaneous reporting.