Md Jahangir Fakir, father of Diya Khanam Mim, who along with another student died in a recent city road crash, yesterday urged the students to go back home as he hoped that Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina will take effective steps to check road accidents. He made the call during a meeting with Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina at the Prime Minister's Office, said Prime Minister's Press Secretary Ihsanul Karim.

"We want students to go back home as measures will be taken to prevent such accidents in the future," Ihsanul Karim quoted Jahangir Fakir as saying. Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina handed over savings certificates worth Tk. 20 lakh each to the family members of Diya and Rajib, the two college students who were killed in Sunday’s bus mishap on the Airport Road.

The premier’s press secretary, Ihsanul Karim, said Sheikh Hasina consoled the parents and said she would stand by the families with all possible support.

“I have no words to console you as I can feel the pain of losing a near and dear one... In a single night I lost all members of my family,” he quoted the PM as saying during her conversation with the family members.

Diya’s father Jahangir Fakir met the PM along with Diya’s mother, brother and sister while Rajib’s mother Mohima Begum met her along with her sister. The press secretary said Diya’s father—a bus driver himself—pointed out some of the problems plaguing the transport sector and its drivers in particular. “Most of the drivers are overworked and exhausted, which result in frequent accidents on the roads,” he said. Home minister Asaduzzaman Khan Kamal and the principal of Shahid Ramiz Uddin School and College, Nurnahar Yasmin, were present.

The Prime Minister urged the children of the families to pursue their studies attentively and use the financial assistance for essential family expenses. The press secretary said the Premier also asked the authorities to provide five buses for carrying students and build an underpass near Ramiz Uddin School and College on Airport Road.

The Prime Minister also issued a directive that special traffic policemen be deployed and speed-breakers be constructed in front of all city schools. She said the government had already taken necessary steps to preclude such accidents in future, by halting the movement of vehicles without fitness certificates and by providing arrangements for drivers to rest on highways. Karim said the parents expressed their gratitude to the PM and their hope that the agitating students would disperse.

Diya Khanam Mim and Abdul Karim Rajib were killed when a Jabal-e-Noor Paribahan bus ploughed through them on July 29. Meanwhile, the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) yesterday alleged that vested quarters were deliberately circulating false and fabricated news about Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina using some online news portals, in a bid to mislead the irate students and the people of the country.

The PMO made the allegation through a press release signed by the PM’s press secretary, Ihsanul Karim. The media release said these false and fabricated news items, which have no basis, were being spread through social media. The release also called upon students not to be misled by such fake news items.