US deputy asst secy holds meeting with BNP leaders
Afreen Akhter, a deputy assistant secretary in the US Bureau of South and Central Asian Affairs, held a meeting with Mirza Fakhrul Islam Alamgir, the secretary general of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), at a hotel in the capital’s Gulshan area on Saturday.
US Ambassador Peter Haas and some other US officials were also present at the meeting, while Mirza Fakhrul Islam was accompanied by his party’s standing committee Member Amir Khasru Mahmud Chowdhury and organising secretary Shama Obayed.
The closed-door meeting lasted for nearly one hour, but none of the attendees briefed the media about the meeting agenda.
A high-level US delegation, led by Afreen Akhter, landed in Dhaka on Saturday morning and met with the BNP leaders within a few hours.
Following the meeting, Amir Khasru Mahmud Chowdhury told the newspersons waiting outside the venue, “They have invited us...we have come...talked. That's all I can say. I have nothing more to say.”
It was the first meeting of the BNP leaders with any foreign delegation following their release from jail after three and a half months of imprisonment.
When asked about the conversations they had, the BNP leader responded, “We had conversations… They invited us and we came. That’s all.”
The journalists later inquired about the BNP’s presentation during the meeting, but he declined to comment on this query as well. They specifically asked if there was any discussion regarding the recent parliamentary election, and the BNP leader replied that he had nothing to share.
It was the first meeting of the BNP leaders with any foreign delegation following their release from jail after three and a half months of imprisonment.
Also, it is the first Bangladesh trip of a US delegation after the reelection of the Awami League government for the fourth term in a row.