‘My son ran toward the gunfire to save people’

There is a moment from Bangladesh’s July uprising that became almost impossible to forget.

On July 18, 2024, the Dhaka-Aricha Highway in Savar had turned into a battleground. Tear gas drifted across the road. Gunfire rang out as protesters scattered. Police were trying to disperse the crowds, and shots were being fired from an armored personnel carrier, or APC.

Amid the chaos, one young man did something that seemed to defy instinct. He ran toward the vehicle.

Shaikh Ashhabul Yamin was a fourth-year computer science and engineering student at the Military Institute of Science and Technology, or MIST. According to his family, he had seen protesters being fired upon and people getting hurt. He believed that if he could reach the APC and close its hatch, he might stop the shooting.

Most people run away from gunfire. Yamin ran toward it. He never came home.

Yamin was shot during the confrontation. Footage of what happened afterward spread rapidly across social media: the wounded student being thrown from the police vehicle onto the road. The images provoked outrage across Bangladesh and became one of the most painful symbols of the July uprising.

For the country, Yamin became a name, a photograph, a symbol of a movement that would eventually bring down a government. For Md Mohiuddin, he remained something much simpler. His son.

Two years later, Mohiuddin still returns to the reason he believes Yamin approached the APC that afternoon.

“People’s lives were at risk, and he wanted to close the APC hatch to save them,” he said. “It was while carrying out that humanitarian responsibility that my son was martyred.”

For Mohiuddin and his family, the question now is not only how Yamin died, but what his death — and the deaths of others during the uprising — will ultimately mean.

“We have only one demand from the state — everyone involved in this killing must be brought to justice,” he said. “We have lost our child, but we do not want any other family to lose a child this way.”

The life before the video

Long before Bangladesh came to know Yamin through the final images of his life, his family knew him through quieter acts.

His father remembers a young man who disliked injustice, worried about the environment and his health, and seemed almost instinctively drawn toward people who needed help.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, when a cobbler lost his livelihood, Yamin helped him. When classmates struggled financially or academically, he tried to assist them. At MIST, his father said, he regularly tutored fellow students without accepting payment.

“He never asked for money or recognition in return,” Mohiuddin said. “Helping people was what made him happy.”

His educational choices also reflected an independent streak.

Yamin secured admission to Rajshahi Medical College but chose not to enroll. He later earned a place in the chemical engineering department at the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology, or BUET. But after the killing of BUET student Abrar Fahad, his father said, Yamin became reluctant to study there.

He eventually enrolled in computer science and engineering at MIST.

His family was not actively involved in politics. Mohiuddin describes his son’s motivations as less partisan than moral. Yamin believed injustice should be confronted and that people had a responsibility to stand beside others.

It was that instinct, his father believes, that eventually took him onto the streets.

Yamin was the younger of two siblings. The family’s ancestral home is in Kumarkhali, Kushtia, but they lived in Savar’s Bank Town residential area. His father is a vice president at Shahjalal Islami Bank; his mother, Mst Nasrin Sultana, is a homemaker. During university, Yamin stayed at MIST’s Osmani Hall in Mirpur.

It was the life of an ambitious young Bangladeshi — university classes, friends, family and plans for a future. Then history intervened.

July 18

The student protests that convulsed Bangladesh in the summer of 2024 had grown increasingly confrontational by July 18. In Savar, Yamin joined the demonstrations.

According to his family, as the confrontation intensified, he saw shots being fired from the APC and protesters being injured. He decided to approach the vehicle.

The precise circumstances of his killing are now the subject of criminal proceedings. His family says Yamin was shot, taken into the APC and later thrown from it. He died before reaching a hospital.

Even bringing him home proved difficult.

According to his family, obstruction from local Awami League activists and police prevented them from taking his body to their ancestral home in Kushtia. Yamin was instead buried at the Bank Town graveyard in Savar.

Less than three weeks later, on August 5, Sheikh Hasina’s government fell after more than 15 years in power. But political upheaval could not answer the question confronting Yamin’s parents.

Who would be held responsible for their son’s death?

In the months after the uprising, Yamin’s killing moved from social media and public outrage into the slower machinery of the justice system.

His maternal uncle, Abdullah Al Munkadir, filed separate cases with Savar Model Police Station and a court. Former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, former ministers, senior police officials and others were among 49 people named as accused.

The International Crimes Tribunal also investigated the killing. Nineteen people have been named as accused in the tribunal case, several of whom have been arrested.

Four police personnel, including ASI Mohammad Ali and former ASP Abdullahil Kafi, were arrested over allegations connected to Yamin being thrown from the APC. Two local Chhatra League and Jubo League leaders and former Birulia Union Parishad chairman Saidur Rahman Sujan were also arrested.

Sujan died on June 15, 2025, while being held at Dhaka Central Jail in Keraniganj.

Former lawmaker Saiful Islam is the principal accused in the tribunal case. The then officer-in-charge of the police station, DIG Syed Nurul Islam and several others have also been named as accused.

For Yamin’s family, the prosecutions matter enormously. But justice, they say, cannot end with one case.

What was July for?

Two years after the uprising, Mohiuddin acknowledges that Bangladesh has changed.

People can express themselves more freely than before, he believes. Criticizing the government no longer carries the same fear of enforced disappearance or extrajudicial killing. Voters have also been able to cast ballots for candidates of their choice.

These changes matter to him.

But Mohiuddin measures the success of July against something more ambitious than the removal of a government. The uprising, he believes, represented a demand to change the institutions that had allowed unchecked power and abuse to flourish in the first place.

By that measure, he says, the work remains unfinished.

He points to the Human Rights Commission, the judiciary, the Anti-Corruption Commission and the Election Commission, as well as constitutional reform and the proposed Police Commission.

“The desired reforms have still not taken place,” he said. “Implementation of the July Charter will pave the way for these reforms.”

Mohiuddin says families of those killed and people injured during the uprising want the government to implement the July Charter and complete the necessary legal reforms within the announced 180-day period.

Behind that demand lies one of the more difficult questions confronting Bangladesh two years after its political rupture.

Removing a government can happen in days. Changing the institutions that shaped it can take years. And revolutions are often easier to commemorate than to complete.

There are anniversaries, speeches, photographs, murals and memorials. Institutional reform is slower and less visible: laws must be rewritten, commissions rebuilt, police practices changed, courts strengthened and systems of accountability made durable enough to survive whoever happens to hold power. For Mohiuddin, these are not abstract debates about governance.

They are part of the meaning of his son’s death.

Keeping Yamin alive through others

The family has tried to preserve Yamin’s memory in another way.

After his death, they established the Shaheed Yamin Foundation. Mohiuddin said the family donated all the financial assistance it received from government and private institutions to the foundation.

It now supports educational, humanitarian and social welfare activities.

“Yamin wanted to live for people,” Mohiuddin said. “That is why, through the foundation established in his name, we are carrying out educational, humanitarian assistance and social welfare activities.”

There is a certain symmetry to the decision. Money the family received because Yamin died is being spent helping the kinds of people he tried to help while he was alive. It is also a way of preserving the person behind the symbol.

Public memory has a way of compressing lives like his. A person becomes a photograph. A photograph becomes a symbol. A symbol becomes part of an anniversary. The ordinary life that existed before it can gradually disappear.

Yamin’s family does not want that to happen.

Nor do they want the country to remember those killed during July while forgetting what sent young people like Yamin into the streets in the first place. Two years later, he lies buried in Savar, not far from the roads where he grew up and where his life ended.

His family cannot change what happened on July 18. What they are asking Bangladesh to decide is what happens after it.

For Mohiuddin, the ultimate measure of the uprising will be whether those responsible for abuses are held accountable; whether institutions are changed so those abuses become harder to repeat; and whether another father can be spared the experience of watching his child become a national symbol because he tried to save someone else.

That, he believes, would be the tribute that matters.

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