Musa Ibrahim, education secretary sued in Rajshahi

A lawyer filed a case in Rajshahi against Musa Ibrahim, the 'first' Bangladeshi to conquer the world's highest peak Mount Everest, and the education secretary on charges of providing wrong information in an article in the Bangla textbook of the fifth grade published by the National Curriculum & Textbook Board (NCTB) published the textbook. 

The headline of the article is 'Bangladesh's national flag in the Himalayan summit'. 

Advocate Ahmed Ibnul filed the case with the Senior Assistant Judge's Court of Rajshahi. 

Ibnul in the case said that there were some wrong information in the article in the textbook's July 2012 version and its website. The remarkable inconsistent issues are the time when Musa Ibrahim climbed to the Everest summit and the heights of the base camp and the Everest peak. 

Ibnul said that in the last sentence of the article's first paragraph, it was said that Musa climbed the highest Himalayan summit at 5:55am. But the official certificate that Musa received from Tibet Mountaineering Association stated that he climbed the summit at 6:50am while the Himalayan database shows it to be at 4:50am. 

But the revised Himalayan database in its September 2013 edition showed the time of climbing the summit to be at 5:16am. 

In the concerned article of the fifth grade Bangla textbook, the height of Mount Everest summit was mentioned to be 29,035 metres. 

But plaintiff Ibnul claimed that the accurate height would be 8848 meters. Besides, the height of the base camp was mentioned to be 6450 meters in the textbook, but the plaintiff claimed the correct height would be 6490 meters.

Ibnul told reporters that the court fixed June 9 to hold a hearing in the case and that the public prosecutors and his (Ibnul) counsels would take part in the hearing on that day.

Asked why Musa Ibrahim was not sued in the case though he did not write the article, Ibnul said: "Musa Ibrahim is our pride. He isn't my enemy. But the correct information regarding him was not mentioned in the textbook. And he (Musa) should be informed of this. That's why he has been sued in the case."