DHAKA, Bangladesh – Officials and family members died in jail on Friday in a Bangladeshi writer who was detained for nearly a year over social media posts criticizing the country’s government. They sounded the alarm about the contradiction against the country.
The author, Mushtaq Ahmed, was among 11 people charged early last year with distributing social media content, including cartoons, alleging mismanagement and corruption in Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s response to the pandemic.
His case has been brought under Bangladesh’s Digital Security Act, a 2018 law that gives the government wide powers to investigate, penalize and arrest anyone who violates its vague principles, including the violation of “solidarity, financial activities, security, defense, religious values or public discipline of the country. ”
Critics say it was used to stifle discord. The Asian Commission on Human Rights said it had documented the arrest of 138 people last year – journalists, students and political activists – for criticizing Hasina’s government.
Mr. Ahmed was detained in the high-security Kashimpur prison and denied bail six times.
Legal organizations have demanded an investigation into his death and called for the Digital Security Act, which also includes measures to protect against cybercrime and attacks, to be repealed.
Mohammad Gias Uddin, the senior supervisor of the jail where Ahmed was detained, said the author lost consciousness on Thursday night and was taken to the jail hospital. Prison guards later took him to a major medical facility in the nearby city of Gazipur, but he was pronounced dead on arrival, Mr. Uddin said.
Doctors at the prison reported that Ahmed “never complained about his health issues”, said Mr. Uddin said about the author, who was 54. “He uses pills for stomach and headaches.”
Nafeesur Rahman, a cousin of Ahmed, who is also a doctor, said he was present during the autopsy.
“I did not find an injury to his body anywhere,” he said. Rahman said, adding that Ahmed’s heart was enlarged and that his blood pressure was very low when he lost consciousness.
The police’s complaint against Mr. Ahmed and the ten others are accused of spreading false information and rumors about the coronavirus and damaging the government’s image by sowing confusion through social media. The complaints were nationalistic and accused them of ‘posting rumors against the Father of the Nation, the war of independence’.
In one of his last posts on Facebook before his arrest before dawn last month by elite forces, Mr. Ahmed compares the country’s health minister to a cockroach. In another, he writes: “If a society complains more about the loss of an economy than the loss of human lives, it does not need a virus, it is already sick.”
Aliya Iftikhar, the senior researcher of Asia at the Committee for the Protection of Journalists, calls his death a devastating and unscrupulous loss. ‘
Mizanur Rahman, a law professor at the University of Dhaka and a former chairman of Bangladesh’s National Human Rights Commission, said the Digital Security Act was being used to curtail freedom of speech in the country.
“We must all understand that criticism of the government is not a riotous offense at all,” he said. Rahman said. “Mushtaq Ahmed was not convicted – he was only nine months in jail on allegations that he criticized the government, and his death in jail is completely unacceptable.”
Bangladesh, one of the most densely populated countries in the world, which also has poor health infrastructure, would always be vulnerable to the coronavirus. Concerns about the pandemic are exacerbated by accusations of deep corruption in the increasingly authoritarian government of a country prone to state capture and political violence.
Also among those who in the case of Mr. Ahmed arrested is the famous cartoonist Ahmed Kabir Kishore, who kept a Facebook journal of political cartoons critical of the government called “Life in the Time of Corona.”
Mr. Kishore remains in jail, despite a call by a panel of experts from the United Nations Human Rights Council. The panel said Mr. Kishore must be released on humanitarian grounds, just as the government released thousands of others as a precaution from Covid-19, due to health conditions that make it vulnerable to the coronavirus.
A statement from the Committee for the Protection of Journalists on Ahmed’s death expressed concern that he was arrested during the latest court hearing on Tuesday. Kishore reported to family members that he was “subjected to serious physical abuse while in police custody and sustained serious leg injuries and ear injuries that led to infections due to lack of adequate medical care.”
“When my brother Kishore was produced in court on February 23, I was there,” Ahsan Kabir, his brother, said in a telephone interview. “Kishore told me he was tortured between May 2 and May 6.”