Mashrafe Mortaza in action against Australia in the World Cup (AP Photo)A top doctor in Bangladesh has alleged that he has been transferred by the government to a remote rural area because of a social media post he wrote against Mashrafe Mortaza, the captain of the Bangladesh cricket team.
“I have been transferred to Rangamati medical college, which doesn’t have any cancer treatment facilities. This seems to me an unnatural process,” Rezaul Karim told AFP on Sunday.
Karim, a child cancer specialist, had earlier been posted at a cancer facility in Chittagong. Around two months ago, he had written a post on Facebook saying that Mashrafe Mortaza “takes pleasure in bowling Bangladeshi doctors”.
The post was in response to an incident that had grabbed a lot of attention in Bangladesh earlier this year. Mortaza, who happens to be the only sitting member of Parliament to take part in the 2019 World Cup, visited a hospital in his constituency and found several doctors absent. A video of him reprimanding a senior doctor over telephone had gone viral on social media.
Whether Mortaza had been in the right or whether the doctors were in the right – it had been reported at the time that Mortaza had made the surprise visit on a holiday – was widely discussed.
Karim said he was one of six doctors served notice by the country’s health ministry for writing social media posts after the incident.
Two months after the incident, he was transferred to Rangamati.
Bengali daily Manabjamin has also reported that the doctor’s transfer was a consequence of his “disrespectful Facebook remark” towards the Bangladesh captain.
