One more defect from Pak High Commission
From Our Special Correspondent, NEW DELHI, SEPT. 23- Mr. S. M. Nurul Huda, 27 a Bengali employee of the Pakistan High Commission here has defected from the High Commission and declared his allegiance to Bangladesh today.
Mr. Huda who joined the Pakistan Foreign Ministry in April, 1969 and was transferred to Delhi in August the same year is the sixth personnel to defect from the Pakistan High Commission here. They include two diplomats.
There are still 20 Bengali personnel including two diplomats working at the High Commission here. Mr. Huda, a bachelor, after coming out of the High Commission compound drove straight to the Bangladesh Mission here in a taxi.
Mr. Huda confirmed the news that the Bengali employees of the High Commission were being held as hostages inside the compound and being subjected to all kinds of indignities. They could leave the mission compound only with prior permission and that too accompanied by non-Bengali employees. Mr. Huda himself was accompanied by another employee whom he had outwitted.
In a statement he said that he had been “watching with horror and anguish the unprecedented genocide, rape and arson being perpetrated in Bangladesh by the barbarous West Pakistan Army. I cannot serve an aggressor who is indulging in aggression in my motherland.”
He declared his allegiance to the “independent sovereign republic of Bangladesh. Pakistan is dead and buried under millions of dead bodies,” he added.
Welcome Mr. Huda, Mr. K. M. Shehabuddin chief of the Bangladesh Mission here, reiterated that no Bengali could associate himself with the barbarous Government of Gen. Yahya Khan as that would mean “aiding Yahya Khan in perpetrating genocide in Bangladesh.” He hoped that other Bengalis still in Islamabad Government’s service would follow Mr. Huda’s “shining example”.
Reference: Hindustan Standard, 24.09.1971