Mubashar Hasan, a Bangladeshi academic and human rights defender who survived 44 days of secret captivity in 2017, has called for an investigation into the role of telecom operators in surveillance under ousted Sheikh Hasina regime.
He questioned in his Facebook whether mobile companies knew their networks and customer data were being used to track people who were later disappeared, detained or killed.
Mubashar raised the questions after Norwegian authorities opened an investigation into Telenor over its former Myanmar operation.
Norwegian police raided Telenor’s headquarters near Oslo on September 15 as part of investigations into suspected complicity in crimes against humanity and possible sanctions violations.
Police said Telenor Myanmar repeatedly provided historical customer traffic data to Myanmar’s military authorities following the February 2021 coup while the regime was committing widespread abuses against civilians.
A separate investigation concerns sanctioned surveillance equipment transferred when Telenor sold its Myanmar business.
Telenor said no individuals had been charged or were under investigation and that it was cooperating with investigators.
The company has said employees faced imprisonment, torture or death if they refused military orders and that it had “no real choice” without putting their lives at risk.
Mubashar, currently an adjunct researcher at Western Sydney University’s Humanitarian and Development Research Initiative, was then an assistant professor of political science at North South University. He was abducted in Dhaka on November 7, 2017, and resurfaced after 44 days.
“When I was forcefully disappeared by the agents of Bangladesh’s military intelligence working under Hasina, my phone was monitored to track my location,” Hasan said.
“I was using a Grameenphone SIM.”
Grameenphone is Bangladesh’s largest mobile operator and is 55.8% owned by Norway’s Telenor.
Hasan said the issue extends beyond one operator and warrants scrutiny of the telecom sector as a whole — particularly how subscriber, traffic and location data were accessed by intelligence and law-enforcement agencies.
“I would assume there are many others like me who were forcefully disappeared, extrajudicially killed or imprisoned on fabricated cases,” he said, alleging their phones were “illegally surveilled and tracked.”
Hasan has previously said unidentified men intercepted his Uber, forced him into a microbus, anaesthetised him and held him in a dark room. His captors discussed whether to kill him before eventually leaving him blindfolded near Dhaka.
Hasan’s questions are reinforced by findings of Bangladesh’s Commission of Inquiry on Enforced Disappearances, which found mobile technology was integral to the system used to locate victims.
RAB and military officers told the commission that “silent pick-ups” — covert abductions designed to leave little trace — were virtually impossible without mobile surveillance capable of pinpointing targets.
Before the National Telecommunication Monitoring Centre became an independent agency, such surveillance was conducted through the National Monitoring Centre inside the Directorate General of Forces Intelligence headquarters, the commission found.
DGFI surveillance systems were also used by RAB and the Detective Branch.
The commission documented cases in which victims received suspicious calls shortly before being abducted, apparently to establish their locations. In another case, a victim’s SIM was activated at DGFI headquarters after his abduction, according to the report.
Hasan questioned what information telecom operators themselves possessed during such operations.
“When I was disappeared, Telenor and Grameenphone had a duty of care to locate the last position of my SIM,” he said, arguing such records could potentially have provided clues to secret detention facilities.
“It was a strong possibility. Telenor did nothing.”
An independent telecom industry expert told Daily Waadaa that there is however no evidence presented by Hasan establishing that Grameenphone, Telenor or other mobile operators knowingly participated in his disappearance.
His claims instead raise questions over how security agencies obtained telecom data, what operators knew about requests for such information and what safeguards existed against abuse, the expert said.
Bangladesh substantially expanded its surveillance capacity during Hasina’s rule.
A Tech Global Institute investigation found that at least 160 surveillance technologies and spyware systems were imported or deployed between 2015 and 2025 at an estimated cost of $184.5 million.
The institute cautioned that the actual figure could be higher because procurement was often opaque.
The systems included IMSI catchers, geolocation trackers, Wi-Fi and mobile interceptors, deep-packet inspection systems and forensic extraction tools, as well as technologies including Pegasus, Predator, FinFisher and Cellebrite.
The NTMC was the biggest identified buyer, while DGFI, police, RAB and other state bodies also acquired surveillance capabilities, according to the research.
The disappearance commission’s final report, submitted in January, received 1,913 complaints and verified 1,569 as enforced disappearances. Of those, 287 involved people classified as missing or dead. The commission estimated the true number of disappearances could be between 4,000 and 6,000 because many victims never came forward.
The broader human rights record was also severe. A UN investigation into the 2024 uprising estimated that as many as 1,400 people were killed between July 1 and Aug. 15, with thousands injured.
It found the former government and security and intelligence services systematically committed serious violations and said there were grounds for further investigation into possible crimes against humanity.
For Mubashar, the Telenor case raises a question that reaches beyond the Norwegian company to the wider telecom industry in Bangladesh.
“Bangladeshi human rights activists, journalists — when will you seriously investigate foreign mobile companies’ complicity in human rights violations?” he asked.
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