He Didn’t See Daylight for Five Years
Alone in the Dark: The Nightmare of Bangladesh’s Secret Underground Prison
In the House of Mirrors, political captives were pushed to the brink of insanity and death. Some are telling their stories now that the woman who put them there, Sheikh Hasina, is gone.
By Mujib Mashal and Shayeza Walid
When his jailers barged in before dawn, the captive thought it was the end. For eight years, he had been held in a windowless cell of an underground prison, dark night without end. Now, the guards ordered him to finish his prayer, then removed the thick blindfold and metal handcuffs he had almost always worn and tied his wrists with cloth — leaving nothing to incriminate them, he thought, if his body was later found floating in a river or lying in a ditch. They bundled their captive onto the floor of a minivan, hiding him under the weight of two men, and set out for an hour’s drive.
But unlike many other political prisoners before him in Bangladesh, Mir Ahmad Quasem Arman was not being taken to his death and disposal. Instead, he said, he was dropped off in a barren field on the edge of Dhaka, the capital.
A lot had changed: new highway overpasses, a recently opened subway system. But Mr. Arman was unaware of the latest and biggest change of all. Sheikh Hasina, the prime minister who had ruled with an iron fist and vengeful designs for the past 15 years, had fled the country as protesters stormed her home...
While Ms. Hasina’s downfall has given her country of 170 million people an opening to chart a new future, it has also lifted the veil on some of the worst abuses of Bangladesh’s recent past. Once an embodiment of her nation’s democratic longings, Ms. Hasina descended over time into autocracy, paranoia and repression, marshaling the state machinery to neutralize any challenge to her grip on power.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/17/world/asia/bangladesh-disappeared.html