Senator Edward Kennedy, the influential American politician who died Wednesday in Massachusetts, was one of the first international figures to alert the world of the Pakistani army's genocide in Bangladesh.

At a time his country's government was busy wooing Pakistan and China, Kennedy also helped focus the world's attention on the unprecedented humanitarian and refugee crisis that had begun unfolding in the Subcontinent - at a cost that India was left to bear at the time.

Successive governments in Dhaka have insisted that up to three million Bangladeshis died in a Pakistani-inflicted genocide.

If the liberal 'Ted' Kennedy was considered a good friend by India, he was positively lionised in Bangladesh after he took on the Republican Administration led by Richard Nixon in 1971 over the destiny of what was then East Pakistan.

In 1971, the 39-year-old Kennedy travelled across West Bengal and other parts of eastern India and documented the plight of Bangladeshi refugees in a scathing report on American policy. He was among the first to tell the world of how Hindu Bangladeshis were targeted by the Pakistani army.

In his report to the Judicial Committee on Refugees, titled Crisis in South Asia, Kennedy told of seeing 'one of the most appalling tides of human misery in modern times'.