Santahar massacre

Santahar massacre was an alleged massacre of up to 1000 men, women and children in the railway town of Santahar, in the present Naogaon District of Bangladesh.

Background
Sanatahar was a railway town in Bogra District was home to about 50,000 Biharis in 1971 who lived in various neighbourhoods of the town.

Eyewitness accounts state that on March 26, 1971, clashes emerged between Bengalis and Urdu speaking inhabitants of the area.

At dawn on March 27, a contingent of the paramilitary East Pakistan Rifles (EPR), police and Ansar arrived from the Naogaon Cantonment and asked the Biharis to lay down their arms. However, these soldiers were actually rebels who had switched sides and joined the Mukti Bahini.

In the afternoon of the same day, March 27, Biharis took refuge at the Jama Masjid of Chaibagan – close to the railway station –where eyewitnesses say that an armed mob entered the mosque and killed almost all the people present in its open courtyard. About 60 people were massacred.

April 10 - April 17
On April 10, armed men attacked a factory where people had been taking refuge since March 27 were killed with machetes, swords and rods. By the evening, when the massacre of the men had been completed, the Mukti Bahini men ordered the women and children either to return to their homes or to go to the railway station.

Victims allege that the Mukti Bahini men came everyday to the platform every day to ‘choose’ people to be taken to a bamboo hut of Haat Maidan. The Mukti Bahini announced that the station was to be made functional and the train service was now to be resumed.

However, two days later, on April 17, they began murdering all civilians.

By April 17, the Mukti Bahini, had massacred all the non-Bengali residents of Santahar. Tahira, a survivor who hid the house of a Bengali family said:

“On the morning of 17, armed men encircled the entire Station Colony and started closing in from all directions. It was a wholesale massacre in which there was no amnesty for anyone.” Another survivor, Syed Pervez Afsar alleges that Bihari children had been killed, their bodies were dumped in the Rupsha river, while survivors were hunted down with machetes by boarding on boats.

Aftermath and reactions
On April 22, 1971, Pakistan Army captured Santahar railway station with the help of the local winemaker.

Ishrat Ferdousi, a researcher on 1971 atrocities, said attacks on Biharis can be termed “genocide." Sarmila Bose in her book 2011 Dead Reckoning: Memories of the 1971 Bangladesh War argues that Bengalis are in a state of denial about the massacre.

The Bangladesh Liberation War Museum has downplayed the massacre, calling them "isolated instances of mob violence."