Abdul Ahad, a three-year-old boy, woke up in the afternoon of July 19 to the noise of two groups pelting each other with stones and went out onto the balcony on the seventh floor of the building at Rayerbagh in Dhaka to see what was happening.
He called out to his father, 鈥楧ad, look! They鈥檙e fighting on the road!鈥� His parents flanked him on the balcony.
A bullet suddenly hit Ahad in the right eye at about 4:30pm and he collapsed onto the floor.
Md Abul Hasan, his father, held Ahad up and hurried down on the road to take him to hospital. But he was caught in the chase between students seeking reforms in civil service job reservations and Awami League activists.
He pleaded for a passage.聽 They stopped for a while to let him pass.
But Ahad never woke up. He died at about 8:30pm the next day in the intensive care unit in Dhaka Medical College Hospital, nine days after his third birthday celebrated on July 12.
The bullet, which Awami League activists appear to have fired, had been lodged inside the head until it was removed during the post-mortem examination.
鈥楬e was a mirthful child. Memories of him only haunt us now,鈥� said Hasan, who works as an assistant in Tax Zone 8, on September 21.
Hassan can forget the pain while he is at work, but his wife Kohinoor Akter, a homemaker, grieves all the time.
鈥楢had loved toy cars so much that we have plenty of them all over our place. Living in a house full of Ahad鈥檚 memories makes it hard for his mother,鈥� said Hasan, who has another son, 11 years old, studying in a residential madrassah.
鈥榃e want a safe Bangladesh where nothing like this would ever happen. No one would lose their child the way we did,鈥� Hasan said.
Ahad was buried in his village home at Bhanga in Faridpur on July 21.
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.