August 30, 2024
DHAKA – If there is one thing that differentiates the arbitrary detention of HM Rana from the other victims of enforced disappearance, it is that he knows exactly where he was inside the Dhaka Cantonment.
Almost every victim of enforced disappearance who came back alive said they were blindfolded the entire time while they were being transported and until they were taken inside their cells, or interrogation rooms.
They were similarly blindfolded when they were taken out of the centre and dropped off in random places.
HM Rana, a musician with Closeup-1 fame, was not picked up in the same manner as others. Other victims usually say they were picked up by men in plainclothes who showed up in unregistered microbuses with tinted windows in the middle of the night.
Since Rana’s uncle was also in the military, he was escorted to the centre by a military officer on February 14 this year.
It was the day of his wedding reception.
“I was taken to a two-storey building with a chocolate-brown gate to the left of the CSD TESS restaurant next to the post office,” said Rana, adding that the compound had a garden in front of it.
“Many old cars were parked in front of the building.”
Rana gave The Daily Star a photo of the building.
“When I entered, I was taken through a metal detector arch similar to the ones seen at airports. There was a reception and behind the desk was a plaque reading ‘Directorate General of Forces Intelligence’. A logbook at the reception had pages full of names with blue or red check marks. I saw that my name was written along with my reporting time — Rana, 8:00am,” he said.
He was led to a room that had sofas. “A man in a suit came in, followed by another. The men had sidearms and badges with DGFI written on them,” said Rana.
And thus began the interrogation, which lasted 48 hours.
“At one point, they brought in various tools of torture and laid them out on a table in front of us. There were pliers and a bunch of rods with metal attachments running through their lengths. A man brought in a device with an extension cord that could be used to give electric shocks,” he said.
As the questioning went on, the men brought the torture devices towards Rana and threatened him. “They brought the shock device towards my head and zapped my hair. A man with pliers threatened to pull my tongue out,” he said.
At one point, they brought in a video camera and asked Rana to strip. As Rana was about to take off his clothes, a lady officer came in, and he was stopped.
“You know what to do when a body part has cancer right? You cut it off. You have come to the place, where we cut out the cancer of society,” Rana quoted one of the men saying.
“I had heard about the fabled ‘Aynaghar’ and was fully convinced that this was one of those places,” said Rana. “Late at night when I was alone with just two guards, I asked them if more people were in the facility. They said there were.”
Before Rana was detained, he said he was getting dozens of calls every day from people claiming to be DGFI officers. “It was strange. They kept asking me to come in and said that if I didn’t, they would have to come and get me, and that it would not go down well,” he said.
Rana was let go on February 15, a day after his planned wedding reception.
“We never got a chance to have a big wedding, so on our anniversary – February 14 – we had arranged a reception. I had gotten my wife the red bridal dress of her dreams. I was taken into the DGFI at 8:00am in the morning, and the entire time, my family thought I would be coming back to attend the reception, but I never showed up. Guests arrived and left puzzled,” he said.
He said he still does not know why he was picked up.
Earlier this month, a delegation of rights activists, led by Mayer Daak, a platform of the families of the victims of enforced disappearance, went to the DGFI headquarters seeking information about the victims.
The delegation was told that the DGFI has 23 facilities. To date, nobody has been given information about where the facilities are or if any detainees are held there.
The Daily Star was unable to contact the DGFI to get their comments.
Victims frequently allege that the DGFI had confined them to the cells, but statistics provided by Odhikar show that they are often not the force in the forefront.
Odhikar logged cases of 709 people who had been victims of enforced disappearance between 2009 and June 2024. Out of those, 206 people were picked up by Rab, 240 people were picked by the Detective Branch of police, and 104 by the police.
Only in 9 cases it was alleged that the DGFI was involved in picking up the victims, while in the cases of 129 others, the abductors could not be identified.
The rest were allegedly taken by the police’s Criminal Investigation Department, Ansar, and Industrial Police.