BSS, Dhaka :
As tens of thousands of emotion-choked people rallied at the then Dhaka International Airport to receive Father of the Nation Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman week’s after Bangladesh’s victory, the global media treated the event as an important episode of the world history.
“An important phase of Bangladesh story came to an end today,” the then NBC television commentator uttered as the plane carrying the leader landed at the airport in Tejgaon.
The report dubbed Bangabandhu as “George Washington of Bangladesh” and described the reception as the “most touching outburst in the most emotional part of the world”.
It simultaneously revealed that the American naval taskforce, which earlier came in support of Pakistani junta, “stemmed out of the Bay of Bengal as he was returning to Dhaka”.
“Before landing the Sheikh’s plane circled Dacca; he had the opportunity to see the estimated one million people who waited for him,” another influential channel ABC TV reported on that day.
It said the uncontrollable jubilation breached the extreme security arrangements as he landed to an emotional welcome.
After the fall of Pakistan, the new Pakistani regime of Bhutto freed him from captivity while a Pakistan Airlines aircraft carried him to London from where he returned home making a brief stopover in New Delhi.
“The bird has flown,” the then Newsweek reported the Pakistani President Zulfikar Ali Bhutto as saying in a cryptic bulletin as he put Bangabandhu aboard a chartered plane for London in the early hours of January 8, 1972.
In its January 17, 1972 issue Newsweek wrote “Amidst tight secrecy, the Pakistani President escorted Mujib to Rawalpindi Airport in the middle of the night and put him abroad a chartered plane”.
“…Mujib’s plane arrived at London’s Heathrow Airport, and the world got its first look at the 51-year-old Bengali leader since he was thrown in jail last spring by Pakistan’s former President Mohammed Yahya Khan,” read the Newsweek article titled “Mujib Flies to Freedom”.
