How the BBC lied to readers about controversial prosecutors who are staging a rigged trial over July and August? - Controversial state prosecutor admits to having supplied the less than 10-second fabricated audio to the BBC

We would like to reiterate our condemnation over the fact that scores of fake audio clips claiming to include voice of our president Sheikh Hasina have been manufactured and circulated on social media ostensibly by pro regime supporters and reproduced by media outlets to stage a media trial with wild claims like she authorized law enforcement to use lethal weapon against unarmed students during July August.

The meticulous use of this fake evidence has been designed to shore up public opinion against the ongoing farcical trial process over July-August violence, deny justice to the victims, legitimise ongoing pogrom, including extrajudicial killing and arbitrary arrests targeting tens of thousands of dissenters, including rights activists and supporters associated with the Awami League.

However, provided with such manipulated clips by regime enablers, including partisan prosecutors and cops, the BBC went ahead with an effort to justify one such clip without telling its readers any context or background, conveniently ignoring the very fact that prosecutors lost their credibility with a series of controversial acts over the past ten months.

In a desperate effort to prove the claim that Sheikh Hasina authorised law enforcement for a crackdown, BBC counted on a less than 10-second unverified audio without any background and its failure to trace the identity of the receiver.

BBC also hid the fact from its readers that the stated so-called audio was supplied by prosecutors who stood accused of staging the ongoing rigged trial process.

However hours after the release of the work, Tajul Islam, the chief prosecutor of the tribunal, who earlier fought legal battel on behalf of Jamaat e Islami undermining country’s worst crimes against humanity, in a Fa, Facebook post admitted that “a special investigation officer of the prosecution team recovered the audio”. This statement exposed the fact that BBC deeper,ately sought to conceal from its readers that it had been supplied by the partisan officials deployed by Yunus regime who are involved in justifying and concealing killing of hundreds of party activists and attacked residences of hundreds of thousands of AL supporters rendering them homeless for past ten months.

The same chief prosecutor, Tajul, was found spreading outright lies during a hearing with regards to police killing and arson on government establishments, including metro rail station, by Yunus supporters despite a sweeping indemnity issued by the regime to help supporters evade justice amid a plethora of admission of such crimes by pro Yunus supporters. In the face of a series of controversial acts to project July-August violence as a sided affair and shield the killers of cops, the entire prosecution team, including Tajul, has lost credibility, pointed out by legal experts who earlier fought a legal fight on behalf of the protesters before August 5. Under the same prosecution team, a lawyer who, on a public Facebook post, campaigned for a death sentence against the Party President was appointed to defend Sheikh Hasina, but was removed only after social media exposure, not by the BBC. In a further crafted act of treachery with readers, BBC used a quote from the prosecutor to ensure the investigation would be used by the tribunal, but concealed details of double standard and outright lies peddled by the prosecutor Tajul and another British lawyer, Toby Cadman.

Surprisingly, BBC cited a statement from law enforcement members who had already stood accused of suppressing regime dissenters. On top of that, the third-party organisation involved by BBC to verify the audio carefully crafted the term “highly unlikely” instead of “impossible” to rule out the fact that the audio can be synthetically generated.

In another classic example of taking fragment of video speech out of context, BBC selectively used three sentences spanning less than a minute from a 7:45 minute national address of Sheikh Hasina, issued on July 17, 2024, to convince the audience that the public address was the call for crackdown against protesters. But a look at the whole address still available 7:45-minute media shows she clearly expressed her condolences on the loss of lives of protesters, and at the same time condemned the use of violence by various political actors under the cover of protest.

Since the start of violence from mid-July, western outlets, including BBC World Service, refrained from exposing the violent cult of Yunus supporters, including militants who infiltrated the peaceful movement earlier waged by students. All the lofty projections about Bangladesh’s future including press freedom under Yunus regime as published by western outlets in the aftermath of August 5 turned hollow and blew out in face of cries and agonies of millions including minorities and women who fell victim to mob rule and state sponsored suppression unleashed by pro Yunus supporters in last eleven months.

Also, the so-called investigation excluded the very fact admitted by terror outfits like Hizbut Tahrir members that, concealing their affiliation and posing as general students, their members infiltrated the movement, lending credence to the previous assertion that the targeted wave of violence flared up on the streets had not been carried out by general students.

We would like to remind the fact that right after the appointment of Yunus as interim chief, a band of Bangladesh bureau chiefs from a number of western outlets and contributors who used to write against the Awami League in the western press were rewarded with lucrative posts as press officers in different high commissions. And those former correspondents who launched hue and cry over rights abuses during the Awami League regime and echoed the statements of Yunus, became hell bent on defending the ongoing abuses under the current regime. Former BBC World Service Bangladesh correspondent Akbar Hossain was one of these former journalists who was rewarded by the Yunus regime with an appointment in the London High Commission as press secretary, a reward ostensibly to echo the narratives on behalf of Yunus in his past workplace.

However, we urge Western outlets to refrain from packaging such biased work as investigative journalism to help the Yunus regime conceal the bloody path it pursued to grab power and add legitimacy to a motivated trial process designed to serve the vendetta of Yunus. We understand that no media outlet holds a record of miserable editorial judgments.⁩