A regret for life

Mukuly Begum literally struggled to take her thirteen-month-old daughter on her lap.

"She was so heavy … She was just a toddler, and yet I failed to lift her up for the last hug," Mukuly said as she recalled the last moments of her daughter 27 years ago.

Jasmine, they had named her after the flower and beautiful she was like the flower, until she became rather grotesque shaped after taking a medicine in 1988.

Her abdomen was swollen awkwardly for she had been unable to urinate for about a week due to renal failure. A few days later, she died at the PG hospital, now known as Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujib Medical University (BSMMU) Hospital, in the capital.

Twenty-Seven years later, as one of these correspondents visited Mukuly in a government staff quarters in the capital's Paikpara on Tuesday, she was still far from getting over the bereavement.

"I knew she wouldn't survive this … All I wanted to do is to hold her in my arms for one last time. She looked so fragile," said Mukuly, now 45, sitting on the edge of a bed in her dimly lit dingy flat.

"I wouldn't have tried to take her on my lap had she grown up to the age of Shamim," she said.

Shamim was the second of Mukuly's six children. Shamim too had died from renal failure at Dhaka Shishu hospital, barely six months before Jasmine. He was six.

Both the siblings died after taking Paracetamol syrup for cold and fever. A doctor at the staff quarters of Bangabhaban, the office-slash-residence of the president, prescribed it for the kids.

Read all stories on paracetamol syrup scam - 

• Justice delayed, justice denied
• All records 'lost' from drug office
• JUSTICE DELAYED, NOT DENIED
• Drug admin official couldn't care less
• A regret for life

Their father, Lalu Miah, was a grade-III government employee and lived at the Bangabhaban staff quarters back then. He had bought the syrup from the government dispensary there.

"Only if I could guess it even for once!" murmured Mukuly. Her eyes, blank and still, were fixed on the floor as she sighed, a rather long and heavy one.

It was not just the burden of sorrow weighing heavily on her from the loss of two children within a span of six months; there was something else, something more to it.

"How could I even possibly imagine that what was meant for curing diseases was actually poison?" she said.

The question cast a spell of eerie silence in the tiny bed room, crammed with furniture and cookware.

"One after another, nine kids in our neighborhood died after taking that syrup at the time," she recollected. "But nobody did anything about it."

Mukuly and other victims started to suspect something was wrong with the syrup after some government people visited their houses looking for the medicine.

Mukuly Begum with her four sons at their home in Paikpara Govt Staff Quarters. Photo: Collected

But it was not until a brave doctor had the syrup tested at a laboratory in the USA and disclosed that the medicine contained lethal diethylene glycol.

The findings forced the government to test the drug in December 1992. It confirmed five companies used the cheap but lethal industrial chemical in Paracetamol syrups.

Subsequently, four of the companies were sued while the fifth manufacturer managed to go scot-free, thanks to their connections in the then BNP government.

Shamim and Jasmine were among the 2,700 children who, according to a BSMMU study, died across the country from renal failure after taking Paracetamol syrups between 1982 and 1992.

But the trials were stuck at the High Court until The Daily Star in 2009 revealed how manipulation and corruption secured a stay on the cases' proceedings in 1994. For 16 years, the stay remained in place and nobody even tried to vacate it.

The trials resumed following the newspaper reports and the Dhaka Drug Court last year sent two owners of Adflame to jail for 10 years. Owners of Rex Pharma were acquitted from the charges by a Mymensingh court after the prosecution allegedly lost the case deliberately by not presenting vital evidence during the proceedings.

The court is set to pass its judgment against six owners and employees of another company BCI (Bangladesh) Ltd today.

And Mukuly is happy to find that justice, though delayed, is not completely denied.

"They should be ordered to be hanged the moment their crime is proved," said the bereaved mother, clinching her jaws.

Trial proceedings against Polychem Laboratories Ltd, the other accused manufacturer of the toxic syrup, are still underway.