Home Minister Asaduzzaman Khan on Wednesday described the report run by Al Jazeera maligning Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina and important persons of the state as yellow journalism. “It’s baseless, politically motivated and part of anti-state conspiracy,” he said while talking to reporters. The minister said a vested quarter ran the report with a certain goal. “The report was run to put the government in an awkward situation belittling Bangladesh,” he said. Earlier, the government of Bangladesh rejected the report as false and purposeful. “The report is nothing than a misleading series of innuendos and insinuations in what is apparently a politically motivated smear campaign by notorious individuals associated with the Jamaat-i-Islami extremist group, which has been opposing the progressive and secular principles of the People’s Republic of Bangladesh since its very birth as an independent nation in 1971,” said a statement of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs on Tuesday. Al Jazeera channel ran a report titled “All the Prime Minister’s Men” on Monday. The fact that the report’s historical account fails to even mention the horrific genocide in 1971 in which Jamaat perpetrators killed millions of Bengali civilians and raped more than two hundred thousand Bengali women, is but one reflection of the political bias in Al Jazeera’s coverage and that of its principal commentator, Mr. David Bergman, convicted by International Crimes Tribunal Bangladesh for challenging the official death toll of 1971 Liberation War, the statement said. There is not a shred of evidence linking the Prime Minister and other State Institutions of Bangladesh to this particular individual, and it is highly irresponsible for an international news channel to draw conclusions on the basis of the words of a mentally unstable person, it said. “The Bangladesh government rejects this desperate “smear campaign” instigated by extremists and their allies, working from London and elsewhere, and regrets that Al Jazeera has allowed itself to become an instrument for their malicious political designs aimed at destabilising the secular democratic government of Bangladesh with a proven track record of extraordinary socioeconomic development and progress,” the statement said. Bangladesh Army Headquarters also condemned in the strongest possible words the concocted and ill-intended report. “This, in fact, is a sequel by the same vested group which has been attempting to destabilise the country in recent times,” said a rejoinder sent by the Inter Service Public Relation (ISPR) Directorate. Bangladesh Army described the report as an attempt by the vested group to break the harmony among different government organs to obstruct the growth and development of the country.