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A monk waits for devotees under the open sky in Ramu of Cox's Bazar. Criminals burned down the pagoda of Mithachhari Bidarshan Bhabna Kendra on Saturday night. Photo: Anurup Kanti Das
A very tiny, ordinary shop of a teenager at Ramu's Fakirabazar market area was the starting point of the six-hour-long communal campaign against the Buddhist on Saturday night, wreaking havoc on an otherwise peaceful area.
Eighteen-year-old Omar Faruk, who runs a mobile servicing shop there, is one of the very few who actually saw the picture insulting the Quran on Uttam Kumar Barua's Facebook page.
A Facebook friend, and not a real-life one, Faruk saved in his computer the image of the web page that showed Uttam was tagged in this derogatory photo.
Within a short time many people came to see the image, and at one point Faruk provided the soft copy of the photo to "three to four" people who wanted it, claiming to be journalists.
But that seems to be all. No one else among the several thousand fanatics who gathered in Ramu upazila town that night to destroy century-old Buddhist temples and pagodas has seen it on Uttam's Facebook page.
But the news of the image of a foot planted on a copy of the Quran on Uttam's Facebook account spread like wildfire from the evening.
Through Bluetooth, it passed from one mobile to another while printed copies were circulated and exhibited in the processions and rallies, inciting the demonstrators.
But Faruk, while relating to this correspondent as to how the publicity of the image had begun from his shop, claims neither to have printed it nor sent it to anyone's mobile phone. He says he has no idea about who copied and then distributed those among the demonstrators.
It was around 6:00pm on Saturday that he went back to his shop with his cousin, Abdul Muktadir, after having some snacks at a nearby restaurant.
Two youths, aged about 25, came to his shop at the time.
“I don't know them, never saw them before. They came to fix a mobile,” Faruk said.
While he was working on the mobile, Muktadir, a student of Shyamoli Polytechnic in Chittagong, was checking his Facebook account.
“At one point, I told Muktadir to log out from his account and log in on my account."
When asked if Muktadir knew his ID and password, he said, "I went to the computer desk and logged in on my account and returned to my work desk. After a few moments, Muktadir shrieked, saying 'What picture is this?'" Faruk said.
At this, he went to the computer desk and saw on his homepage the picture whose source was Uttam Kumar Barua's account.
“The two customers also came to the computer desk and saw it,” Faruk said, “They were asking why we were watching it and insisted on knowing where the photo had come from.
“We did not want to tell them but when they kept insisting, I told them that it came from my friend Uttam Kumar Barua's account."
The two youths left the shop around 7:00pm after Faruk had fixed the phone.
After they had left, Faruk again went to the computer desk and had another look at the image when he found Uttam was tagged by another Facebook account titled “Insult allah [sic].”
He then started to capture all the pictures from the “Insult allah” account and also captured the page where it was evident that the picture had come to his page from Uttam's account.
Faruk said by 7:30pm he found that Uttam's account had become unavailable. By this time, some people had started to gather in front of his shop to see the picture.
“I do not know from where they got the information, but they came soon after the two customers had left the shop. These people were repeatedly asking me to show them the picture."
He claimed he had to show the image to the all-curious people who gathered in his shop.
Though Faruk claimed the photo Uttam was tagged in appeared on his Facebook page, The Daily Star has obtained from a Ramu inhabitant the snapshot of the social networking site that shows the photo appeared on Muktadir's Facebook home page.
Asked if the photo appeared on his page or Muktadir's page, Faruk repeatedly said, "It was on his page because Muktadir is not a Facebook friend of Uttam."
“There was a continuous flow of curious people, many of them unknown, but I knew some of them as they were from our area," he said, adding that from among the crowd three to four persons introduced themselves as journalists.
“They came with a small digital camera and forced me in a way that I had to give them all the images, including the one from Uttam's Facebook account, saved in my computer,” Faruk said.
Around 8:00pm some policemen from Ramu Police Station came to his shop and demanded to see the picture.
“I have no idea how the police came to know about it, but when they came the crowd was smaller than before,” said Faruk, adding that he showed the picture to the policemen and then they left his shop.
When more people were joining the gathering again, Faruk said, he and Muktadir closed the wooden door of the shop from inside.
But a little later some other policemen came to the shop and asked Faruk to go to the police station with his computer.
“Muktadir and I had to go to the police station with my desktop computer,” said Faruk, adding when they went there, they were asked to wait for a top police official “who would come to see it.”
“We waited at the police station till 12:30am [Sunday] but none came to the police station to see the picture,” Faruk said.
He added that from the police station they were hearing noises of demonstrations and came to know from friends' phone calls that Buddhists' pagodas had been set on fire.
They also saw the red flames of fire in the dark sky when they were waiting at the station.
At around 12:30am on Sunday, Faruk and Muktadir were asked to leave the police station, leaving their computer there.
“Muktadir went back to his home and I returned to my home and went to bed around 1:00am,” said Faruk.
Faruk claimed he did not open his Facebook account regularly and on Saturday evening he opened it without any prior knowledge about the picture.
He also claimed he never saw the two unknown customers before and after the attack but he guessed they possibly spread the information about the picture because no one else knew about the picture on his computer other than those two customers and himself and Muktadir.
Faruk said each and every one, including himself, became very angry after seeing the picture.
He claimed no procession was brought out on Saturday evening from near his shop though some locals said a procession was brought out from there led by some locals, including an elected union member of this area.
Faruk did not continue his studies after class four. He learned operating the computer and Internet from Uttom's cousin, Komol Barua, who also has a mobile servicing shop at Awlad Shopping center in Ramu town.
The shop, Shubho Mobile service, remains closed since Saturday morning, said Nazir Hossain, owner of a computer shop at the market.
And five days into the incident, no one seems to know of the whereabouts of Uttam, his wife and a four-year-old child.
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