On August 7, at 3 a.m., prisoner number 116 was suddenly awakened by his jailers. As every time he leaves his 2 x 3 meter cell, his hands are handcuffed, his eyes blindfolded, his head covered with a hood. His relatives have had no news of him since he was kidnapped by Bangladesh government security forces on April 9, 2019. After more than three hours of driving, the minivan in which he was loaded with three armed men s stops in the middle of a rice field. “Don’t call for help. In half an hour, you will be able to escape,” his guards promise him. Long minutes pass, the man crouches, convinced of the imminence of gunshots. “I was convinced that they were going to shoot me,” says today Michael Chakma, 45, defender of the rights of indigenous populations in the Chittagong Hill Tracts region, whom Le Monde met in the back room of ‘a café in Dhaka, out of sight. As a security measure, he was accompanied by a member of his party. Read also | Article reserved for our subscribers In Bangladesh, the fall of a dynasty Read later From his prison he knew nothing, heard nothing, but Bangladesh has just experienced an unimaginable revolution. After fifteen years of authoritarian rule, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, 77, responsible for her disappearance, was ousted on August 5 by a mass student movement. An interim government, led by 2006 Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus, took office three days later. Mr. Chakma’s executioners took advantage of the chaos to abandon him in a forest region near Chittagong, some 200 kilometers from Dhaka. For the first time in five years, he saw the light of day. Traces of the summer 2024 revolution still visible in the streets of Dhaka, Bangladesh, September 11, 2024. ROBIN TUTENGES In the wake of the fall of the “iron begum”, at least three other people have resurfaced in similar circumstances. Among them, Ahmad Bin Quasem, son of an industrialist associated with Jamaat-e-Islami, the largest Islamist party in Bangladesh. After eight years of detention, the man was thrown into a ditch in the suburbs of Dhaka on the night of August 6. Abdullahil Amaan Azmi, a former soldier kidnapped in 2016, son of one of the Jamaat leaders, was also released on August 6. Atiqur Rahman Rasel, a student leader of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), the main opposition party under Mrs. Hasina, was dropped about thirty kilometers from Dhaka on August 7. He had been missing for thirty-seven days. You have 78.8% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.
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