Forty-four years ago today, on May 30, 1981 (April 27, 1981 lunar calendar), Bangladesh crushed a military coup. In the early morning of May 30, 1981, gunfire suddenly erupted and artillery roared in the hotel of the city government of Chittagong, Bangladesh, in the eastern part of the South Asian subcontinent. President Zia Rahman, who was visiting and staying at the hotel on the 29th, heard the abnormal movement outside, so he opened the door to see what was going on. Suddenly, a group of heavily armed soldiers swarmed up and pointed the muzzles of submachine guns at his chest. "What are you doing?" Rahman asked sharply. Before he finished speaking, the soldier who rushed to the front pulled the trigger, and the 45-year-old Rahman fell down and died on the spot. Such were the first scenes of a military coup orchestrated by Major General Mansour Ahmed, commander of the 24th Division of the Bangladeshi Army in Chittagong. Mr. Ahmed has a long history of coup plots. His displeasure with the president dates back at least to 1977, when Zia Rahman restructured the armed forces, removing Mr. Ahmed as chief of staff for operations, intelligence and communications at army headquarters and transferring him to Chittagong as commander of the 24th Division. Mr. Mansour left bitterly, and has been brooding ever since. After three years of careful management, the 24th Division has far exceeded the size of other divisions, and its strength is equivalent to one-third of the total strength of the army. Of the four brigades of the division, three brigades were commanders who were his cronies. The commanders and staff at the battalion level were all officers sent by the "freedom fighters". Therefore, Mansour thought that he was full of feathers and "I am the only one in the world". In early May 1981, Mansour suddenly received a transfer order from President Rahman from the capital, ordering him to return to Dhaka as the head of the National Defense Staff College. As soon as the transfer order arrived, Mansour was like an ant on a hot pot. He felt that the matter was serious. Seeing that his military power was about to be lifted, if he did not start immediately, his entire "presidential dream" would be in vain forever. Mansour urgently consulted with his cronies and hastily decided to mutiny. Mansour delayed the implementation of the transfer order while stepping up preparations for a coup. He secretly mobilized 4,000 troops loyal to him to stay at the Chittagong camp so that they could be dispatched at any time, and publicly announced that the night training of the troops there in May was actually a coup drill, and it was also to deceive and paralyze all parties on the night of the operation. In addition, Mansour also transferred some officers he considered unreliable from Chittagong to work in other defense areas or forced them to go on vacation. At 9:00 am on May 29, President Zia Rahman left Dhaka on a special plane and flew to Chittagong for inspection. After arriving in Chittagong, the president and his party checked into the government hotel. After a short break, Mansour's close aide Mutiur called Lieutenant Colonel Mafz, the president's personal staff officer, and told him in code words that he would do it that night, hoping that he would cooperate internally and externally. Mafz, who was secretly collaborating with the enemy, naturally agreed. In the afternoon, Mansour and his cronies held another meeting after Friday's Islamic prayer ceremony, and once again studied and implemented the operation plan and deployment of the president's murder. After Mansour was briefed on the preparations for the coup, he believed that since there were already internal contacts, there was no need to use large troops, and instead used commandos selected from "freedom fighter" officers to carry out the task. Finally, Mansour was firm. "Now, the time for action has come," he said. "I don't care what you do or what you use. I have made up my mind. If I don't succeed, I will become a benevolent person." That day, Zia Rahman's event schedule was very tight. Shortly after he arrived in Chittagong in the morning, he called a meeting of the ruling Nationalist Party Standing Committee at the hotel, which continued until 2 pm. Then he met with local celebrities separately. In the evening, he went to bed after dealing with dispatches, because he planned to fly back to Dhaka the next morning. At 3:30 am, under the cover of the storm and night, a commando team of 16 Mansour's closest officers set off in three vehicles from the 24th Division headquarters and headed straight for the hotel. They divided into three squads: the first squadron was ambushed near the hotel and was responsible for cutting off the outer passage; the other two squadrons fired rocket launchers, threw several grenades and strafed the hotel gate with light machine guns, and then rushed into the hotel together under the smoke of gunpowder. The second unit quickly captured the ground floor, while the third unit rushed to the second floor and killed the guard upstairs. Lieutenant Colonel Mutiur first ran to the president's suite, slammed the door, and shot Zia Rahman at close range the moment he opened the door. According to a senior aide to Rahman, who was staying in a government hotel that night: "Our president, although small in stature, was one of the bravest men I have ever met, and he stood up to the insurgents." During the brief homicide fight, 28 members of the president's entourage and guards were injured, and only two commandos were wounded. At 5 am on the 30th, Lieutenant General Ershad, the army chief of staff in Dhaka, learned of the news of the president's murder and immediately informed the prime minister, deputy prime minister and cabinet ministers and other government leaders. They rushed to the Army General Hospital together, and asked Vice President Abdul Sattar, who was hospitalized, to be discharged from the hospital as acting president to preside over the government. Then, according to the constitution, elections will be held within 180 days to elect a new president. Sattar, 75, immediately presided over an emergency meeting of the cabinet and the heads of the armed forces to discuss the coup situation. He decided to use a combination of political offensive and military pressure against the coup group and the rebels, and urged the internal division of the 24th Division to force Mansour to surrender. On the one hand, the army chief of staff Arshad mobilized troops, carefully deployed, and prepared to counterattack; on the other hand, in order to avoid bloodshed, he also made a radio and television speech, announcing that Mansour, the commander of the Chittagong garrison, and four other brigade commanders were removed from the army, and called on the rebel soldiers to leave the Chittagong barracks and report to the nearest government barracks. He assured that as long as the rebel soldiers turned themselves in, they would have "complete security". Arshad's speech was broadcast repeatedly on Dhaka radio. Under the strong political offensive, the morale of the rebels quickly collapsed. On the day of the coup on May 30, three corps of the 24th Division had already surrendered to the government. The artillery regiment, the 305th brigade and other units also defected one after another. On the morning of the 31st, the government issued an ultimatum to the rebels, ordering them to surrender within a time limit. In the afternoon, the centrifugal tendencies of the lower-ranking officers and soldiers of the 24th Division developed sharply, and the leaders of the coup group panicked. In the evening, Mansour contacted the army headquarters in Dhaka by phone, expressing his willingness to negotiate peace with the government. The army headquarters categorically refused the peace talks and ordered him to surrender unconditionally. Seeing that the situation was over, the leaders of the coup group began to choose their own way to flee. At 2 am on June 1, Mansour and his family fled in a car towards the Mon-British-Myanmar border in the Chittagong hills. After the government troops entered Chittagong, they offered a reward of 500,000 taka (about $30,000) for the capture of the rebel leader Mansour - dead or alive. At 4 p.m., Chittagong police, with the cooperation of residents, captured Mansour in a tea plantation in the village of Fatichari, 40 miles southeast of Chittagong, near the Burmese border. He was arrested along with a brigade commander and a colonel. On the evening of June 1, Mansour was escorted to the Chittagong barracks, where he was shot dead on the spot by a group of angry soldiers. So far, the short-lived coup that began with the assassination of Zia Rahman has failed completely.