A last minute plan by General Yahya Khan to execute the Bangladesh leader Sheikh Mujibur Rahman as a final act of vengeance was stymied by the kindness of his jailer. This was revealed to me exclusively a few hours after the Sheikh’s unexpected arrival in London yesterday. On December 4, the day after the India-Pakistan war began, Yahya Khan summoned the three-man military tribunal which had tried Sheikh Mujib on charges of sedition and treason and ordered them to write an order for his execution. The order was kept in abeyance till December 15 when, with Dacca about to surrender, Yahya Khan decided that it should be carried out.

According to sources close to the Bangladesh leader, Yahya Khan was in a demented mood. His armies had been defeated in both East and West. There were signs of mutiny by military groups in West Pakistan. In a fit of rage he declared: “I should have killed that man the day I took him prisoner. Hang him now.” Accordingly a military team was sent from Rawalpindi to Mianwali where Sheikh Mujib was being kept in solitary confinement. The team went about its work in a methodical manner. A shallow grave was dug in the cement floor of the room adjoining the Bangladesh leader’s cell. He was told that this was being done “as an air raid precaution.” But Sheikh Mujib knew what it was for. And he prepared himself for the worst.

It was then that the India-Pakistan war ended. Dacca itself surrendered on December 16. A gaoler taking pity on Sheikh Mujib and knowing that Yahya Khan was on the point of abdication, smuggled him to his personal quarters, where he kept him hiding for two days. The operation was helped by the confusion that attended the surrender of the Pakistan Army. When Mr. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who assumed the President’s office from Yahya Khan, was asked by the execution team to revalidate the hanging order, he refused.

A few days later, the Sheikh was transferred from his jail in Mianwali to an official bungalow in Rawalpindi. It was only then that he was given a radio has first contact with the outside world in 10 months. Sheikh Mujib was to learn later from his jailors that Yahya Khan’s execution squad had come prepared with false documents intended to show that the Bangladesh leader had been hanged at the end of October. The sentence of the martial law tribunal that tried him had been similarly falsified on the instruction of Yahya Khan.