DHAKA – Blindfolded, handcuffed and bundled out of his secret prison for the first time in eight years, Bangladeshi barrister Ahmad Bin Quasem held his breath and listened for the sound of a cocked pistol.
Instead, he was tossed from a car and into a muddy ditch on Dhaka’s outskirts — alive, at liberty, and with no knowledge of the national upheaval that had prompted his abrupt release.
“That’s the first time I got fresh air in eight years,” Quasem, 40, told AFP. “I thought they were going to kill me.”
Sheikh Hasina, the prime minister responsible for Quasem’s abduction and disappearance, had fled the country hours earlier.
Her August 5 departure brought a sudden curtain down on 15 years of autocracy that included the mass detention and extrajudicial killing of her political opponents.
But Quasem was in the dark.
He had been confined in the “House of Mirrors” (Aynaghar), a facility run by army intelligence, given its name because its detainees were never supposed to see any other person besides themselves.
Throughout his long incarceration, Quasem was shackled around the clock in windowless solitary confinement.
His jailers were under strict instruction not to relay news from the outside world.
Elsewhere in the detention center, guards blared music throughout the day that drowned out the Islamic call to prayer from nearby mosques.
It prevented Quasem, a devout Muslim, from knowing when he should offer his prayers — and from keeping track of how long had elapsed since his abduction.
When the music was off, he heard the anguished sounds of other detainees.
“Slowly, slowly, I could realize that I am not alone,” he said. “I could hear people crying, I could hear people being tortured, I could hear people screaming.”
Human Rights Watch last year said security forces had committed “over 600 enforced disappearances” since Hasina came to power in 2009.
Rumors abounded of a secret black site housing some of that number, but Aynaghar was unknown to the public until the publication abroad of a 2022 whistleblower report.
Hasina’s government consistently maintained afterwards that it did not exist.
It also denied committing enforced disappearances, claiming some of those reported missing had drowned in the Mediterranean while trying to reach Europe.
