THREE militants belonging to the banned Jama'atul Mujahideen Bangladesh were charged on October 7,2007 for carrying out serial bombings in four cinemas in Mymensingh on December 7, 2002. The carnage killed 21 people and injured or maimed around 200 others. The charge sheets, however, did not include anyof the 40 individuals, including political leaders and intellectuals who were detained soon after the blasts, following intervention by top leaders of the then ruling allaince pointing fingers at the detainees.

The detainees were also tortured severely in custody. They included Awami League (AL) leader Saber Hossain Chowdhury, Mymensingh AL president Principal Motiur Rahman, writer-journalist-human right activist Shahriar Kabir, columnist Professor Muntassir Mamoon and Reuter journalist Enamul Hoque Chowdhury.

Likewise, charges were finally pressed on June 12, 2008 in the sensational August 21 grenade attack case against 22 persons, including top Harkat-ul-Jihad (Huji) leader Mufti Abdul Hannan and BNP leader and former deputy minister Abdus Salam Pintu.

The development came after years of drama during the rule of BNP-Jamaat government over investigation into the grisly attacks on an AL rally in Bangabandhu Avenue in 2004. However, the masterminds behind assassination attempt on AL chief Sheikh Hasina remain undetected even after charges have been pressed in two cases filed in this connection.

The government investigators acknowledge that although 22 people have been charge-sheeted, the key planners of the grisly grenade attack are still untraced.

While the BNP-Jamat government was still at the helm, an investigation was conducted under the direct supervision of Lutfuzzaman Babar, the then state minister for home, and 20 persons including a student, Shaibal Saha Partha, and AL leader and ward commissioner Mokhlesur Rahman were arrested.

Here again, none of these arrestees who had to undergo a lot of harassment and tortures, a usual phenomenon in the dark era of the alliance government's mal-governance, were found guilty in the latest investigation.

The drama got a twist with the then government's claim about the "confessions" of one Joj Miah, that a criminal gang carried out the attack. The present administration later found that, as per the then government's desire, those confessional statements were obtained using force. The CID investigators and the supervising officer involved were found to have paid Joj Miah's family a few thousand taka per month.

Even the one-member judicial probe committee of Justice Joynul Abedin, formed by the then government, pointed at a foreign "enemy" country's involvement in the incident, a ludicrous assertion to say the least. These are only two highly horrifying cases out of many, where the government authorities apparently manipulated the criminal investigations and the judicial probes.

In tune with the usual utterances of their supreme leader after every carnage carried out on the opposition leaders and the secular institutions, the BNP lawmakers in parliament in presence of erstwhile Prime Minister Khaleda Zia blamed AL for perpetrating the grisly attack on its own rally.

Firstly, should the multi-faceted crimes of this magnitude against the independence and objectivity of the criminal investigation system of the state and humanity go unpunished? In his address to the nation on April 12, 2007, the chief adviser (CA) of the CTG, while outlining his government's priorities made a solemn pledge to the nation: "We are making all-out efforts to uphold citizens' rights, rule of law, and justice in all sectors controlled by the state so that the people of Bangladesh can one day say with pride, 'the messages of justice do not cry in seclusion in this country, ' " he said.

It is, therefore, only incumbent upon the current government to investigate, publicly expose, and bring to book the individuals who were responsible for ordering the phony investigations, and detaining, remanding and torturing the innocents, thereby removing any trace of trust on the criminal investigation system.

Secondly, what redress has the state meted out to those innocent people who had to undergo psychological and physical torture at the hands of the state machinery? To draw a parallel, it would be pertinent to cite the landmark story of one Maher Arar, a Syrian born Canadian citizen.

Arar was arrested by US agents at New York's JFK Airport on the basis of inaccurate information provided by Canadian police (RCMP) linking him to terrorists. He was sent to his native Syria, where he was imprisoned and tortured for a year before being released.

The Canadian government formed a one-member judicial commission to assess the actions of Canadian officials in dealing with the deportation and detention of Maher Arar. In its report, the judicial commission disclosed that there was no evidence that Arar was ever linked to extremist groups and found that the FBI and U.S. security officials were given an inaccurate and unfair picture of Arar by the RCMP, and that this portrait dogged his entire time in a Syrian jail.

Following the publication of the report, the chief of RCMP made a somber apology to Maher Arar and his family and resigned. The Canadian parliament issued a unanimous apology for the detention and torture of Arar. Notwithstanding the fact that his party was not at the helm of state when the incident occurred, the Conservative PM of Canada Stephen Harper issued a formal public apology to Maher Arar and paid him $12.5 million in compensation for his ordeal.

Probably in 1998, the Bangladesh Supreme Court (SC) fined the government Tk.100, 000 compensation for each of the opposition detainees who were detained for a few weeks under the special power act, albeit the defense counsels did not ask for it. The victims, in that case, did not suffer any mental or physical torture either. However, the SC never repeated the practice.

At the dawn of a new beginning, as stated by the CA of the CTG in more than one speech, it would perhaps be in the fitness of things for him to initiate a process of redress for the wrongs done to those who had been detained and tortured at the dictum of those who betrayed the trust vested on them by the citizens of the republic, and absolutely ruptured the fabric of trust in the criminal investigation system.