DHAKA, Feb 23: Bangladesh’s top information official was sacked on Monday for ridiculing the country’s founding leader in a poem which compared him to a ‘dried plum’, an official said.

Information secretary A.T.M. Fazlul Karim was sued on Sunday by an official of the ruling Awami League for calling Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, who led the country to independence in 1971, a ‘dried plum’ – a derogatory term meaning good for nothing in Bangladesh – in a 2006 poem.

“Karim has been sent into retirement with immediate effect for writing a derogatory poem on Sheikh Mujib and his family,” a government spokesman said.

Sheikh Mujib was assassinated along with more than a dozen members of his family in a military coup in 1975.

His two daughters, including the current Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, survived the tragedy as they were visiting Europe at that time.

Sheikh Mujib was named father of the nation after Bangladesh came into being in 1971 following secession from Pakistan.

But after his death, military regimes stopped calling him the nation’s father and his contribution to the country’s independence was played down.

The honour was reinstated when Sheikh Hasina became prime minister in 1996.

But a Bangladesh Nationalist Party government, led by her bitter rival Khaleda Zia, dropped the reference again after she won polls in 2001.

Sheikh Hasina stormed back to power after leading her father’s Awami League to a landslide victory in elections last December.—AFP