The Hindu : Front Page : Taslima in London

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Thursday, Mar 20, 2008
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Taslima in London

Marcus Dam

KOLKATA: Controversial Bangladeshi author Taslima Nasreen has landed in London.

“I left New Delhi very early in the day and am now in London, but please don’t ask me my destination for the sake of security – the same reason why I had withheld the date of my departure prior to leaving the country,” she told The Hindu over telephone from London’s Heathrow Airport on Wednesday.

In an e-mail to this correspondent, sent at 11.35 p.m. on Tuesday, she says she was left “with no other alternative but to leave this country.”

She says:

“Even though they [the government] constantly pressured me mentally to leave the country, I refused to budge. I was determined I would not leave this country. When they saw it was pointless trying to destroy my mind, they attempted to destroy my body. In this they succeeded by ruining my health, which leaves me with no other alternative but to leave this country.

“I am forced to leave India. I used to call this [the undisclosed ‘safe location’ in New Delhi where she was put on November 23, 2007] the torture chamber. I gradually came to realise that it was the chamber of death instead.”

Ms. Nasreen said from London that she was invited by the President of the erstwhile Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, to address the State of the World Forum. She would address it and other seminars to speak of things “I have not been able to all these months in confinement.”

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