Missing Bangladeshi lawyer reports on Hasina's secret prison

Instead, he was thrown from a car and into a muddy ditch on the outskirts of Dhaka – alive, free and unaware of the national unrest that had led to his abrupt release.

“It was the first time I had been outside in eight years,” Quasem, 40, told AFP. “I thought they were going to kill me.”

Sheikh Hasina, the prime minister responsible for Quasem’s kidnapping and disappearance, had left the country a few hours earlier.

Her departure on August 5 brought an abrupt end to a 15-year autocracy that included mass arrests and extrajudicial executions of her political opponents.

But Quasem was in the dark.

He had been imprisoned in the “House of Mirrors” (Aynaghar), a military intelligence facility that got its name from the fact that the people imprisoned there were never allowed to see anyone other than themselves.

During his long imprisonment, Quasem was handcuffed around the clock in a windowless solitary confinement cell.

His prison guards had strict instructions not to pass on any news from the outside world.

Elsewhere in the prison camp, guards played loud music throughout the day, drowning out the Islamic call to prayer from surrounding mosques.

As a result, Quasem, a devout Muslim, no longer knew when to pray – nor could he keep track of how much time had passed since his kidnapping.

When the music stopped, he heard the tortured sounds of the other prisoners.

“Slowly, slowly I realized I was not alone,” he said. “I could hear people crying, I could hear people being tortured, I could hear people screaming.”

According to Human Rights Watch, security forces have committed “over 600 cases of enforced disappearances” in the past year since Hasina came to power in 2009.

There were numerous rumors about a secret black site housing part of this number, but Aynaghar was unknown to the public until the publication of a whistleblower report abroad in 2022.

Hasina's government subsequently insisted that this mistake had not occurred.

The organisation also denied that they were individuals guilty of enforced disappearances and claimed that some of the missing people had drowned in the Mediterranean Sea while trying to reach Europe.

Quasem is clear about the reason for his kidnapping.

His father, Mir Quasem Ali, a senior member of Bangladesh's largest Islamist party Jamaat-e-Islami, was put on trial the same year.

Ali was accused of leading a paramilitary group that tortured Bangladeshi independence supporters during the country's war of independence from Pakistan in 1971.

He and several others were indicted by a war crimes tribunal, ostensibly to bring justice to the victims of that devastating conflict, but many see this as Hasina's attempt to eliminate her political opponents.

Whether Ali was guilty or not was impossible to say given the mockery of justice that accompanied his prosecution.

Quasem, then 32 years old and admitted to the bar in London, took over the defense of his father.

His regular media briefings on the tribunal's procedural errors and judicial bias, joined by human rights groups and UN experts, made him a target.

One night, plainclothes police officers broke into his house, snatched him from his family, dragged him down the stairs and threw him into a waiting car.

“I could never have imagined in my wildest dreams that they would make me disappear just days before my father’s execution,” Quasem said.

“I kept telling them, 'Do you know who I am? I need to be there to fight my case. I need to be there with my family.'”

Quasem's father was hanged four weeks later. Quasem only found out about this about three years later, when one of his prison guards accidentally let the news slip.

After the car he had used to get out of prison sped away, Quasem spent the entire night trying to find his way home on foot.

By pure chance he came across a medical clinic run by a charity for which his father had once served as a trustee.

He was recognized by a staff member and frantically searched for a phone number to reach his family, who rushed to be with him.

But first, the excited chatter of those around him told him about the weeks of student protests that had led to his release.

“The whole thing was made possible by a few teenagers,” he said.

“When I see these children, these young people leading the way,” he added, “I am really confident that this will be the opportunity for Bangladesh to take a new direction.”

Quasem and his family welcomed AFP warmly into their home – but the trauma of his imprisonment was immediately apparent.

The thick, coiffed hairstyle he had before his incarceration has shrunk to a few wild tufts and he has lost a shocking amount of weight.

His wife, Tahmina Akhter, said the publicity surrounding Quasem's case left her feeling excluded from other mothers at her children's school.

On each anniversary of his disappearance, the family was regularly harassed and asked not to make the matter public.

His two young daughters were three and four years old when he was taken away.

The older one witnessed his kidnapping and is still afraid of certain authority figures, such as the private security guard stationed in front of her school.

The younger one couldn't remember him at all.

“It didn’t feel like eight years to us,” Quasem’s mother Ayesha Khatoon told AFP.

“It felt like eight lifetimes.”

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