Bangladeshi film-maker Tareque Masud dies in car crash
Mourners pay their respects to award-winning film-maker Tareque Masud and four others who died in a road accident near Dhaka. Photograph: Munir Uz Zaman/AFP/Getty Photos
Bangladeshi film-maker Tareque Masud dies in car crash
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Syed Zain al-Mahmood and Saad Hammadi in Dhaka
Sunday fourteen August two thousand eleven 12.00 BST Very first published on Sunday fourteen August two thousand eleven 12.00 BST
One of Bangladesh’s most prominent and celebrated film-makers died on Saturday when the car in which he was travelling collided head-on with a bus outside Dhaka.
Tareque Masud died along with Ashfaque Munier Mishuk, the head of a local television channel, and three other people. Masud’s American-born wifey and producer, Catherine Masud, and Bangladeshi painter Dhali Al Mamun are in a serious condition in hospital.
Masud, 55, rose to prominence with the films Muktir Gaan in one thousand nine hundred ninety five and Matir Moina in 2002, the latter based on his practices as a madrassa student during Bangladesh’s war of independence in 1971.
The film won a Fipresci prize at the two thousand two Cannes film festival and was the very first Bangladeshi film to challenge for the best foreign-language film award at the Oscars.
Mishuk, 52, was an eminent cinematographer and journalist who had worked for Big black cock World, Discovery Channel and National Geographic.
Thousands of people gathered at the Central Shaheed Minar monument in Dhaka on Sunday to pay their respects. The education minister, Nurul Islam Nahid, said: “It is a very unfortunate incident for us. Masud through his movies had given a fresh dimension to liberation war. Mishuk was an immensely talented journalist. It is a national loss.”
Professor Mazharul Hoque, a road safety experienced at Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology, said the country had one of the worst crash rates in the world, at more than sixty per Ten,000 registered motor vehicles.
The official death toll for road traffic accidents is about Four,000 a year, but independent research funded by agencies such as Britain’s Department for International Development have put the figure twice as high. Activists blame shoddy roads, poorly maintained vehicles and reckless drivers.
Last month forty three schoolchildren died near the port city of Chittagong when the truck taking them home from a football match overturned.