Prime minister Sheikh Hasina on Wednesday paid homage to Shaheed Sheikh Russell, the assassinated youngest son of Bangladesh’s founding president Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, to mark his 60th birthday.

Russell, the youngest brother of Hasina, was brutally killed along with their father Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and most of their family members in a carnage on August 15 in 1975. He was then only 10-year-old and a Class IV student at University Laboratory School.

October 18 is observed as Sheikh Russell Day as per a Cabinet Division decision taken in 2021.

On Wednesday morning, the prime minister along with her younger sister Sheikh Rehana went to Banani graveyard and placed wreath on the grave of Russell. They also spread flower petals on the graves of all martyrs of Sheikh Mujib’s family.

Hasina and Rehana offered fateha and joined a special munahat seeking eternal peace of the departed souls of the father of the nation Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, his wife and other martyrs of the August 15 carnage.

The two daughters of Sheikh Mujib escaped the mayhem as they were travelling abroad at that time.

Russell was born on October 18 in 1964 at the historic Bangabandhu Bhaban at Dhanmondi road number 32 in the capital. He was named after Sheikh Mujib’s favourite writer, renowned philosopher and Nobel laureate Bertrand Russell, by Mujib himself and his wife Sheikh Fazilatun Nesa Mujib.

Marking the day, government bodies, ruling Awami League, its associate bodies and different socio-cultural organisations have taken up various programmes at home and abroad.