ACCUSED ASSASSIN IN LIMBO
BANGLADESH SEEKS ORDER FORCING CANADA TO DISCLOSE STATUS OF MAN AT THE CENTRE OF A BLOODY COUP
In August 1975, a group of soldiers stormed the residence of Bangladesh’s first president and brutally gunned down him and his family. It was the start of a military coup. Only two of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s daughters, both in West Germany at the time, survived.
One of those daughters was elected as Bangladesh’s leader two decades later and, ever since, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina has been on a mission to bring her father’s killers to justice. In 1998, 15 men were convicted in a trial; after lengthy appeals and three acquittals, five were executed in 2010. But the man thought to have personally fired the bullets that killed Hasina’s father was convicted in absentia, and has never faced punishment.
Instead, Nur Chowdhury has been living free in Canada since 1996, much to the outrage of Hasina. Now Bangladesh is pushing once again to have Chowdhury returned. A new Federal Court application was filed on June 7 that seeks to force the federal government to disclose Chowdhury’s current legal status, which is a mystery both to the public and to the Bangladesh government.
Although Chowdhury’s refugee claim was rejected by Canadian officials over his alleged role in the assassination, he has escaped deportation due to the death sentence handed down by the Bangla desh court. Following multiple Supreme Court decisions, Canada does not deport people likely to be executed or tortured. (There is a caveat for “exceptional circumstances,” though that remains vague in practice.)
Hasina reportedly raised the matter directly with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in a meeting following the G7 Summit in Quebec, which Bangladesh was attending as one of 12 countries invited to an “outreach session.”
In a June 11 report in the Daily Star, the largest Englishlanguage newspaper in Bangladesh, Hasina’s press secretary said that during the meeting Hasina “called for Trudeau’s personal initiative for immediate extradition of the selfconfessed killer, one of the two assassins who directly shot Father of the Nation Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman dead.”
(Chowdhury would likely dispute being “selfconfessed,” as he had tried to declare his innocence when applying for refugee status.)
Hoffman and his agent, Robert Hooper, both denied to the Ottawa Citizen that Caryk was behind the online harassment, which Melinda Karlsson alleges included death wishes and accusations of drug use that led to the Karlssons’ first child being stillborn in March. Erik Karlsson himself replied to that anonymous Instagram comment by suggesting that he knew the author had been harassing him and his wife “for months” but that “this is an all new low even for you. You are a disgusting person.”
The Senators are investigating, as are Ottawa police.
Fans of just about any team have probably heard stories about affairs and love triangles that have led to locker-room strife. Often these rise to the apocryphal and not much more, but anytime a fight between teammates breaks out in practice, one of the early theories is usually that there is a woman involved. Or gambling debts.
Rarely, though, has something quite so ugly spilled out, especially with the added twist of social media being the forum for the behaviour in question. It’s a most modern of sports stories, with someone allegedly using the presumption of anonymity granted by an Instagram account with a fake name to target a victim with a public profile.
If the posts and comments are linked back to Caryk — stating again for the record here that the Hoffman camp denies she is behind them — then it would be the second time in less than a week that social media behaviour had a potentially franchise-altering impact on the fortunes of a professional sports team.
Last week it was Barbara Bottini, the wife of Philadelphia 76ers president and general manager Bryan Colangelo, who was identified as the author of hundreds of Twitter posts, on anonymous accounts, that defended her husband, and occasionally criticized his players and divulged team secrets. What started out as a funny story about a thin-skinned executive turned grim when it turned out Colangelo’s wife was just trying to stand up for him. He lost his job and was not particularly appreciative of her efforts.
But the ugliness of that story is mild relative to what is alleged to have happened with the Senators. The fact that Karlsson took legal action against Caryk suggests that there is little chance of fence-mending to be done here, even if the harassment is linked to someone else. Hoffman’s agent even acknowledged as much, telling the Citizen that “it would be very difficult for both parties to co-exist.” Either Caryk has conducted an awful socialmedia campaign against the wife of a Sens teammate, or she has been unfairly accused of doing so by that wife. That horse will not go back in that barn.
This is the part of team management that fans, and media, often don’t see when we consider trades and draft picks and any number of transactions that simply move players around like pieces on a chessboard. It’s easy to slip into the habit of treating players purely like property, assets to be exploited. That attitude can be pervasive, as can be seen anytime a player has the temerity to ask for a trade, or decline one, or leave in free agency. That way lies a jersey burned in anger.
The athletes-as-chattel concept is also seen when players are routinely blasted for poor performance without any consideration of contributing factors. Some players absolutely do not put in the work to become successful, others try their damnedest but struggle in unfamiliar surroundings, or in a difficult role, or just because they are lonely.
They get paid great sums of money, to be sure, for a career that is, deservedly, the envy of most fans. But athletes can get hurt, too. They can lose a child. They can struggle with depression and abuse. It is trite to say that star players are also human. But sometimes we need to be reminded of that.