In 1975, 27-year-old Sheikh Hasina said goodbye to relatives seeing her off ahead of a trip to Europe from Dhaka. Among them were her three brothers, mother and father, the then president Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, who had helped secure independence from Pakistan four years earlier.
It was the last time she’d see them alive. Two weeks later, mutinous army officers murdered them in a massacre of nearly 20 of her relatives, plunging Bangladesh into a military dictatorship and leaving Sheikh Hasina stranded overseas with her sister Sheikh Rehana.
“We didn’t know what really happened,” she later said. “We didn’t know that all the family members were assassinated . . . My younger brother was only 10 years old. They didn’t spare him.”