By 8 a.m. on May 26, villagers from Burunga and surrounding settlements had gathered at the high school. At around 9 a.m., collaborators Abdul Ahad Chowdhury and Dr. Abdul Khaleque arrived in a jeep alongside a Pakistani army contingent led by Captain Nur Uddin. They checked the assembled crowd against a prepared list and appeared satisfied with the turnout. Meanwhile, another group went door to door commanding any remaining men to report to the school. At roughly 10 a.m., the soldiers separated the crowd. Hindus were herded into the school's office room. Muslims were taken to a classroom, made to recite the kalma and the Pakistani national anthem, and most were then released. The remaining Muslims were ordered to bind the Hindu captives with ropes, tying them in groups of four. The nature of the gathering had become horrifyingly clear.

Inside the office room, some captives began to cry. Among them was Srinibas Chakraborty, who managed to force open a window. Priti Ranjan Chowdhury, the headmaster of Burunga High School, and Ranu Malakar, a young Hindu man, leaped through the opening. The Pakistani soldiers opened fire, but both escaped into the surrounding countryside. Their survival would later provide crucial testimony about what happened inside the school that day. Others were not given even that desperate chance. Ram Ranjan Bhattacharya, a prominent lawyer at the Sylhet Judges Court who had also been detained, was told he could go. As he rose from his chair, he was shot from behind and died instantly, a killing that seemed designed to demonstrate that no status or profession offered protection.

At about noon, the Hindu captives were brought outside and arranged in three columns of roughly ninety people. On Captain Nur Uddin's command, soldiers opened fire with three light machine guns. The killing was systematic and swift. Afterward, the soldiers poured kerosene over the bodies and set them alight. The following day, Pakistani forces returned to Burunga. With the help of chairman Injad Ali, they hired laborers to bury the charred and partially burned remains in a pit beside the school. The collaborators who had facilitated the massacre, led by Abdul Ahad Chowdhury and Dr. Abdul Khaleque, looted the village and assaulted its women. A few survivors, including Srinibas Chakraborty, Jitendra Baidya, and Adhir Malakar, had endured multiple gunshot wounds and lived to bear witness.

There is no consensus on the exact number killed. Estimates range from 71 to 94. Survivor Srinibas Chakraborty maintained that 94 people died, but the generally accepted figure is 78 Hindu men and boys. The Burunga massacre was one of many targeted killings of the Hindu population during the 1971 Liberation War, part of a broader campaign by the Pakistani military and its local collaborators against Bengali civilians, with Hindu communities singled out for particular violence. The killings at Burunga followed a grim pattern repeated across East Pakistan: promises of safety used to gather victims, ethnic separation, and mass execution. The scale varied from village to village, but the method and intent were consistent.

In 1984, thirteen years after the massacre, the government of Bangladesh enclosed the mass killing site with a brick wall. Later, a memorial was erected for the victims. The Burunga High School still stands, its grounds now carrying a weight that no school should bear. The memorial serves as one of hundreds of markers scattered across Bangladesh that trace the geography of the 1971 genocide, sites where the ordinary infrastructure of daily life, schools, fields, riverbanks, became places of mass death. For the families of Burunga and the surrounding villages, the drumbeats of May 25 carried a promise that was inverted into its opposite. The memorial ensures that what happened the next morning is not forgotten, even as the generation that survived it grows smaller with each passing year.