‘Worse than death’: Victims describe the nightmare of Bangladesh’s secret prisons during former regime

When the guards barged into his cell one evening as he was saying his nightly prayers, Mir Ahmad Bin Quasem Arman was convinced it was over.

“I thought I was being taken for execution,” the lawyer said. “I said a last prayer in my mind for my passing to be quick.”

It had been eight long years since Quasem was abducted from his Dhaka, Bangladesh, home by paramilitary forces and taken to a windowless cell in a secret prison, where he was kept in the dark, blindfolded and handcuffed for 24 hours a day, for months on end. 

But that evening in August of last year, he was suddenly shuffled from his cell into a van and driven to an empty field, where his captors pushed him into a ditch. 

The gunshot he was expecting never came. Quasem heard the van drive away instead. 

“At the time I didn’t know that there had been a change of regime, that the fascist [Hasina] had gone,” Quasem, 40, told CBC News in an interview at his office in Bangladesh’s capital Dhaka.

His abrupt release came days after Sheikh Hasina, the prime minister who had ruled Bangladesh with an iron fist for 15 years, fled the country aboard a helicopter, after protesters stormed her official residence following several weeks of bloody protests against her regime. 

As the South Asian country — now run by interim leader Muhammad Yunus, who’s promised steep reforms — tries to rebuild a robust democracy following the student-led uprising that ousted Hasina, stories like Quasem’s have shocked the country, with a clearer picture emerging of the previous regime’s treatment of dissenters. 

‘House of Mirrors’ 

Quasem is one of Bangladesh’s “disappeared” — victims of a program that targeted Hasina’s political opponents, with hundreds vanishing without a trace after being taken by security forces. 

Many ended up in what was code-named the “House of Mirrors,” a secret military detention centre in the capital Dhaka, only one of hundreds of suspected underground jails across the country. 

Other abductees were killed and their bodies thrown in rivers, loaded down with cement bags to stop them from resurfacing, according to a Bangladeshi commission of inquiry. 

In its preliminary report released in December, the commission, which was set up by Bangladesh’s interim government soon after Hasina was chased from power, concluded that the former prime minister and her senior officials orchestrated a highly-organized program of enforced disappearances that was “systematically designed” to remain under the radar. 

The country’s International Court Tribunal issued arrest warrants for alleged crimes against humanity during the violent protests last summer, and for Hasina’s alleged role in the system of enforced disappearances while she was in office.

The United Nations human rights office has also accused Hasina and her security and intelligence apparatus of “serious and systematic” rights violations during the three-week protest movement that led to her ouster.

UN human rights chief Volker Türk estimated more than 1,400 demonstrators were killed, with the majority shot by police or other security forces.

Turk said that an initial investigation found the violations could amount to crimes against humanity, as they were “carried out with the knowledge, co-ordination, and direction of the former political leadership and senior security officials” who were aiming to suppress the protests and stay in power.

Hasina, who is in exile in neighbouring India, denies the charges against her, calling them politically motivated. 

In a recent speech on social media to her Awami League party’s followers, the ousted prime minister accused Yunus of playing with fire and of destroying Bangladesh in his “hunger for power.” 

It came shortly after a court in Bangladesh issued yet another arrest warrant for Hasina, this time for allegedly abusing her power to procure land illegally. 

‘Worse than death’

Quasem, grabbed by security forces at 32 years old, was kept in near total darkness and could hear others in cells beside him crying and screaming as they were being tortured. 

“What I was subjected to felt worse than death,” said Quasem, who is struggling with post-traumatic stress and trauma-induced depression after his ordeal. 

He had repeated nervous breakdowns while he was held captive, lost dozens of pounds and developed epilepsy, as well as cataracts in both eyes from malnutrition. His wrists often became raw and infected from the metal handcuffs that he was forced to wear rubbing against his skin. 

But the worst pain for Quasem during his eight years of darkness was emotional — worrying about the toll on his family, particularly his two daughters who were three and four years old when he was taken.

He was haunted by one vivid memory as he was being dragged into a van by paramilitary officers wearing plainclothes. Quasem heard his four-year-old daughter running after him, carrying his shoes and telling him he shouldn’t leave home without them. 

“It felt like I was [being] buried alive. Not knowing whether my family knew whether I was alive or dead,” Quasem said, calling the detention centres “meticulously designed to prolong suffering”. 

The successful lawyer was taken while he was in the middle of a high-profile trial as part of the legal team defending his father, Jamaat-e-Islami, a prominent leader in Bangladesh’s Islamist opposition party. 

His father was convicted and executed for alleged war crimes a month after Quasem was forcibly disappeared. 

Quasem, seemingly targeted for his family connections rather than anything else, is now back with his family, trying to readjust to a life that was devastated. With eight years stolen from him, he’s missed seeing his daughters grow into teenagers.

“We are father and daughter. But it’s as if we’re strangers,” he said, trying to describe the lingering trauma. 

“I have to get to know my children all over again.”  

‘The pain is so fresh’

The commission examining the system of enforced disappearances under Hasina’s rule received more than 1,600 reports of people being forcibly disappeared, and more than 700 accounts have been verified. But officials believe the actual number of victims could be two or three times higher.

For hundreds of families, the agony is in not knowing what happened to their loved ones.

“It’s been 12 years and the pain is so fresh,” said Mashrufa Islam, breaking down in tears during an interview at her Dhaka home as she described what happened to her abbu, meaning father in Bengali. 

Saiful Islam Heru, a former independent MP, disappeared in November 2013, two months before a general election in Bangladesh in which Hasina won by a landslide. 

The elections were not fair and free, according to human rights groups and various global leaders, who criticized the widespread crackdown on opposition politicians before the vote.

Heru was driving back to Dhaka with his brother and one of Islam’s cousins when they were stopped by paramilitary officers, said Islam, 39. 

Her family tried to get answers, repeatedly visiting officials with the Bangladesh police’s elite anti-terrorism unit to ask what had happened to Heru, until Islam said she herself received a veiled threat. 

“[A senior officer] told me: ‘You could also go missing,'” Islam said. 

The family immediately stopped speaking out about her father, fearing they would also become targets.  

Nearly 12 years later, Islam said she didn’t have any hope left that her father, who would now be 75, is still alive. His is one of the 330 cases the commission of inquiry has tracked where the victims have not returned home. 

“He didn’t deserve this. Only because he was in an opposition party from the ruling government,” said Islam. 

“They kept on making people disappear,” she said, through her tears. “This is not the way of a free country. This is not the way of a democracy.”

She wants to know exactly what her father went through, even though her aging mother and her older sister prefer not to hear the details. 

The entire family is praying they will see justice, including jail time for those “at the highest level” who allegedly issued the order to abduct her father. 

That might provide some type of closure, Islam said, even if the fact that her father was forcibly disappeared robbed her family of the dignity of saying goodbye.

“It’s such a painful thing,” she said. “Not seeing your father, not giving him a proper funeral.”

‘Some will still be untraceable’  

In February, Bangladesh’s caretaker leader, Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus, visited several of the secret prisons. 

“We don’t want to stay in this darkness,” Yunus, 84, told reporters following the tour. 

He credited those on the enforced disappearances commission with doing the hard work to gather evidence and give credence to the stories from those who survived the detention centres, and from victims’ families still waiting for answers. 

“They have complete proof and they will get justice,” said Yunus, who has promised to implement steep reforms. He added that the wider goal is to make sure the horrors of secret prisons and extrajudicial killings are not repeated in the future. “That’s our commitment.” 

But the interim government knows how difficult the task ahead might be, with the scars of the disappearances running deep in a country where justice is often delayed, and many of the accused currently in hiding outside Bangladesh. 

While Yunus has promised that Hasina will stand trial for crimes against humanity, even though India has so far ignored its neighbour’s extradition requests, he has also tried to temper expectations over how quickly the families of victims will see high-level security officials behind the enforced disappearances behind bars themselves. 

“Some will get punished, some will still be under the process, some will still be untraceable,” the interim leader told Sky News last month. 

An election in Bangladesh is expected as early as December 2025, although that date could be pushed back a few months, with the pace of reforms slow. 

But Sanjida Islam Tulee and other family members of the victims say they are tired of the long wait for answers. 

The disappearance of her brother Sajedul Islam Sumon in 2013 prompted Tulee and their mother to create a protest group called Mayer Daak, or “mother’s call.” The group organized street rallies to bring attention to the plight of Bangladesh’s disappeared even while Hasina was still in power, despite pressure from the then-government to stay quiet. 

In the days after Hasina fled the country, hopes were high, said Tulee. She and her mother had a lengthy visit with Yunus, who had just been named chief adviser to lead the interim government. 

But weeks passed with still no word on justice for their missing family members. 

“People keep talking about the new Bangladesh, about change. But I don’t see any results,” Tulee, 41, told CBC News.

“All I see on my side is so much pain and trauma.” 

She wants fair and transparent trials and for those in charge of the system of enforced disappearances to be punished. 

Islam says she would also like to see the secret prisons open to everyone, as a reminder of the horrific chapter in Bangladesh’s recent history. 

“We want this truth to come out.”