Parliament erupted in uproar on Thursday as Home Minister Salahuddin Ahmed and Opposition Chief Whip Nahid Islam clashed over whether a fire that gutted the ancestral home of National Citizen Party (NCP) lawmaker Nusrat Tabassum in Kushtia was an accident or an arson attack.
The blaze broke out shortly after midnight at the house in Bagowan village of Daulatpur upazila. Several rooms of the tin-roofed house were destroyed, and goats kept there died. Tabassum, an NCP joint convener and reserved-seat member of parliament, said petrol bombs were hurled at the property. She blamed Awami League-linked individuals and said she had received threatening phone calls before the attack. The NCP said CCTV footage showed four consecutive explosions at the house around midnight.
Raising the matter in parliament, Nahid Islam, who is also the NCP convener, said four petrol bombs had been thrown at the house. He said a video widely shared on social media clearly showed an object being thrown from outside, after which the whole house caught fire. He rejected the claim that the house was abandoned and said Tabassum had filed a general diary at a police station two days before the fire over the threats she received.
In reply, the home minister said an initial investigation suggested an electrical short circuit might have been the cause. He described the building as a tin-shed, semi-concrete house in which nobody lived at the time, saying only two goats and some belongings were inside. Tabassum's parents live in a three-storey house about 20 meters away, he said. The minister added that the local officer-in-charge had told him no traces of petrol bombs were found, and that it would not be appropriate to blame the entire government before the investigation was complete.
The minister said a joint committee of Border Guard Bangladesh, the Fire Service, the civil administration and police had been formed to determine whether the fire was accidental or deliberate.
His remarks triggered a brief uproar in the House. NCP lawmakers, including Abdul Hannan Masud and Mahmuda Alam Mitu, stood and spoke without microphones. Deputy Speaker Kayser Kamal repeatedly asked Masud to take his seat and urged opposition members to let the minister finish. A second round of heated exchanges followed later in the session.
Outside parliament, the NCP held a rally and torch procession in Dhaka to protest the incident. A party leader called the home minister's statement perfunctory and objected to the house being described as abandoned.
Meanwhile, an attempted murder case has been filed over the fire. According to the complaint, eight people were named as accused, along with 25 to 30 unidentified others, including activists of the banned Chhatra League and Jubo League. A preliminary assessment by the Fire Service was reported to suggest that someone may have set the fire deliberately because of a pre-existing dispute, though the official cause has not been established.
Tabassum said she would keep doing her work despite the attack. The opposition Jamaat-e-Islami and the NCP have also blamed the government for intelligence failures they say have contributed to a recent spate of attacks.
