Lt Col (Retd) Quazi Sajjad Ali Zahir, took a shovel and joined workers digging up a dried-up pond at Purba Rai Para, a hamlet in Tripura.

The veteran soldier of Bangladesh Army toiled for almost four hours on Sunday to dig up the skeletal remains of a sepoy, who fought under his command more than 36 years ago.

The Bangladesh Government has sent a seven-member delegation to the northeastern state to take home the mortal remains of Sepoy Hamidur Rahman, one of the most revered Mukti Yoddha (liberation warrior) of Bangladesh.

Both Rahman and Zahir were soldiers of the ‘Mukti Vahini’, the rag-tag force of guerrilla warriors, who fought the Pakistanis in 1971 to give birth to Bangladesh.

Rahman died close to India-Bangladesh border on October 28, 1971. His comrades crossed over to adjacent Purba Rai Para with his corpse and buried him there. The village was later deserted in late 1980s and water from an irrigation canal submerged the grave and its surroundings into a pond.

India’s Border Security Force, with the help of locals and an old comrade of Rahman, traced the grave under the pond a few weeks back, after Dhaka requested New Delhi to find the martyr’s remains.

“He (Rahman) was just 18 when he ignored the volleys of bullets to crawl into a Light Machine Gun post and took on the enemy-soldiers manning it. He got killed eventually, but not before lobbing a grenade into the post and thus silencing the gun and saving his comrades’ lives,” said Zahir, originally an officer of the Pakistani Army’s East Bengal Regiment.

Rahman turned into a legend by the time the war ended  and was posthumously conferred the highest gallantry award of Bangladesh, ‘Bir Shreshtha’.

The District Magistrate of Dhalai B B Das said that he had officially handed over Rahman’s mortal remains to Mohammed Humayun Kabir Khan, the Joint Secretary of the Ministry of Liberation War Affairs of the Government of Bangladesh.

“The remains will be taken to our country on Monday and re-interned with full state honours at the Martyrs’ and Intellectuals’ Burial Site at Mirpur in Dhaka on Tuesday,” said Khan, who is leading the delegation from Bangladesh.

Nearly 36 years after he died to ‘liberate’ his country, Hamidur Rahman will finally be laid to rest in the land he belonged to.