Sumaiya Akter stepped out onto the balcony at her parents’ house at Siddhirganj in Narayanganj in the evening of July 20 as a helicopter was flying past amidst the sound of gunshots.
Moments after she had been there, a bullet, apparently fired from a helicopter, hit her in the head at about 6:00pm. She collapsed onto the floor that was the fifth storey of the building.
Sohaiba, two months and a half old, was sleeping in the bed. Sumaiya had put her daughter to sleep after breastfeeding her shortly before she went to the balcony.
Everybody in the neighbourhood, Painadi Natun Mahalla, heard sounds of gunshots and helicopters. Many rushed to the balcony and the window and some climbed onto the roof to see what was happening.
Sumaiya, 20 years old, called out to her mother and said, ‘I’m going to see what’s happening.’
‘I heard a thumping sound a while later,’ said Asma Begum, Sumaiya’s mother. ‘I rushed to the balcony and saw her collapsing.’
There were hardly any vehicles on the road. A curfew had been ordered since midnight past July 19.
The family could manage an auto-rickshaw to take her to Pro-Active Medical College and Hospital half an hour later, where she was pronounced dead.
Awami League people were not letting the family bury her in the Siddhirganj graveyard. But they could finally bury her an hour before midnight only after the intervention of the neighbourhood people.
Sumaiya married Zahid, an apparel worker, about two years and a half ago without letting anyone know. They had been in love but the marriage hit a snag as Zahid and his family demanded Tk 100,000 in dowry that Sumaiya’s family could not pay.
‘We barely get by. Zahid does not visit his daughter. He does not provide any financial support either. Only I am now left to shoulder her responsibility,’ Asma said at her house on September 12.
Sumaiya was the third of five children of Asma, who lost her husband Selim Matubbar, a security guard in a factory, in 2020.
Her eldest son Shakil, recently married, and the younger son Sajal together earn about Tk 20,000 a month to run the family of six.
Md Mushfiq, a resident of the neighbourhood, said that indiscriminate gunfire from helicopters began that day after a building on the Dhaka-Chittagong Highway had been burnt at about 5:00pm.
‘The police used to live on the fifth and sixth floors of the building. Awami League activists chased by protesters also took refuge there,’ he said. Both the police and Awami League activists trapped inside the building fired gunshots, leaving several dead and many wounded.
The government on August 28 said that about 1,000 people had died in student protests that flared into a mass uprising and toppled the Awami League government on August 5.
