In the two months since Bangladesh’s prime minister, Sheikh Hasina, fled amid mass protests, the country’s 170 million people have had the chance, for the first time in 15 years, to chart a new future out of what remains a deeply uncertain period.
But for three men, it has simply been a chance to see the world again.
Michael Chakma, a tribal rights activist, was abducted in 2019 as part of a campaign of enforced disappearances and spent five years in an underground military prison. He was one of three men set free in August after Ms. Hasina’s departure.
“It was the first time I saw daylight in five years,” Mr. Chakma said. “As I was seeing this, I was trying to double-check if I was just imagining this light or if it was real.”
Under Ms. Hasina, who came to office in 2009, hundreds of people vanished after being abducted by her security forces. Many of the victims were killed and their bodies discarded. The rest were shut in a secret military detention center, code-named the House of Mirrors.
With Ms. Hasina no longer in power, The Times was able to piece together the story of her secret detention program. Here are some of the takeaways from that investigative article.
Who was imprisoned, and why?
Once an embodiment of her nation’s democratic longings, Ms. Hasina descended over time into autocracy, paranoia and repression, marshaling the state machinery to neutralize any challenge to her grip on power.
Embedded in that effort’s deepest recesses was Ms. Hasina’s program of enforced disappearances. More than 700 people were forcibly disappeared from 2009 to this year, according to estimates by human rights organizations. The true count is most likely far higher, they say.
People were targeted in some cases over the smallest of political actions: organizing an opposition rally, blocking a road in protest or posting an angry message on social media.
What was the House of Mirrors?
Secret long-term detentions were entrusted to the military’s intelligence wing. Many detainees were taken to an underground prison, where some said they had heard morning military parades taking place above them.
“Let me show you,” said Maroof Zaman, a former Bangladeshi ambassador to Qatar and Vietnam who spent 467 days in the prison before re-emerging in 2019.
He opened Google Maps and zoomed in on a military garrison in the capital, Dhaka, pinpointing the part now marked as Aynaghor — Bengali for House of Mirrors, a code name first revealed in 2022 by Netra News, a Bangladeshi news outlet operated in exile.
What was it like inside?
The internment center was a tightly run operation intended to prolong a life barely worth living. Medical checkups were regular and thorough. Haircuts: every four to six months. Direct physical torture, if any, was kept to the early days, during interrogations.
The goal instead was to torture the mind.
For eight years, Mir Ahmad Quasem Arman, a lawyer who was detained in 2016, said he had been held in a windowless cell of the underground prison, a dark night without end. He was made to wear a thick blindfold and metal handcuffs nearly all the time.
Asked by The Times to sketch the facility, three former detainees drew practically identical blueprints: long corridors with half a dozen rooms facing away from each other. There were toilets at each end, a standing one and a squatting one. Each cell had a large exhaust fan meant to both drown out the guards’ chatter and send the prisoners into madness.
Early into his eight years of imprisonment, Abdullahil Amaan Azmi, a decorated former army general, said he would try to catch a bit of sunlight through two small ventilation openings. “But once they found out through the CCTV camera,” he said, “they closed those off.”
What now?
About 450 of the known disappeared turned up alive, released months or years after they were hauled away and ordered to maintain a strict silence, the rights groups say. For 80, the families received only their bodies. Roughly 150 victims remain unaccounted for.
Now, the military’s role in the detentions is drawing questions. The Bangladeshi military has long found prestige in being a top contributor to United Nations peacekeeping missions abroad. After the country’s institutions collapsed with Ms. Hasina’s departure, the military pitched itself as the only institution with the credibility to hold Bangladesh together as it faces a difficult road ahead.
The country is now being run by Muhammad Yunus, an 84-year-old Nobel laureate, who has taken some steps to bring light to the tragedy of the disappearances, including forming a committee to investigate the crimes.
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