at Britannia Royal Naval College in Dartmouth, England. After his graduation he married Sayeeda Iqbal Manda Banu in 1955. They had two daughters – Shahina Khan and Zubaida Khan. On 1 May 1956, Khan received his standing commission. In 1960 he became the Gunnery officer of P.N.S (Pakistani Naval Ship) Tughril. In 1963, Queen Elizabeth II awarded him for being a disciplined officer. In 1964 he became the torpedo and anti-submarine officer of P.N.S Tippu Sultan. From 1967 to 1968 he served the Pakistan Navy as the Joint Chiefs’ Secretariat Staff officer in the Defence Ministry in Rawalpindi of West Pakistan. In 1970 he became the officer in charge of the torpedo and anti-submarine school in the P.N.S Himalaya and in the West Pakistani city of Karachi he served as the Seaward defence officer. During the Bangladesh Liberation War in 1971, when East Pakistan became Bangladesh and then went to war with West Pakistan for independence, Khan, at that time, was still staying in West Pakistan. Because of his patriotism towards Bangladesh, Khan and his family was placed under house arrest by the Pakistan government. Even after the war was over, Khan was still placed under house arrest for two more years till 1973, when he was able to escape from West Pakistan to Afghanistan. From Afghanistan he went to India and then finally to his motherland, Bangladesh. In October 1973, in Bangladesh Khan became the first Bengali to be appointed as the commandant of the Mercantile Academy of Chittagong. In February 1976 he became the Assistant Chief of Naval Staff (Operations and Personnel) of the Bangladesh Navy. In December 1976 the Royal Navy of the United Kingdom sold a Salisbury class frigate to Bangladesh which came to be known as BNS (Bangladeshi Naval Ship) Umar Farooq. The ship arrived in Bangladesh on 27 March 1977. Khan became the captain of the BNS Umar Farooq and with this ship he travelled to the ports of Algeria, Yugoslavia, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Sri Lanka. On 4 November 1979, Khan became the Chief of Naval Staff of the Bangladesh Navy and on 1 January 1980 he grew to the rank of rear admiral. Khan worked hard to modernise the Bangladesh Navy. In the aftermath of the Bhola cyclone in 1970, a small uninhabited offshore sandbar landform called the South Talpatti sandbar emerged in the Bay of Bengal. Although South Talpatti was uninhabited