On September 20, 15-year-old Musa Sheikh walked out of jail after spending 33 days behind bars.
He had been arrested over a June 11 confrontation between local residents and the Coast Guard in Mongla, a clash that followed months of demands for answers about the disappearance of fisherman Miraj Sheikh.
Miraj’s family says Coast Guard personnel took him away in April. The Coast Guard denies detaining him.
Musa’s family says he was among those swept up after the June confrontation and that Coast Guard and police officers arrested him together.
“He was arrested by the Coast Guard and police together,” his elder brother Sajib Sheikh told Daily Waadaa.
Musa is still not 16, Sajib said. His birthday is three to four months away.
His release brought some relief to his family. But in the villages around Joymonir Ghol, where the feud took place, residents describe something that has proved harder to leave behind…fear.
Sajib said people were worried about arrests, criminal cases and threats. Some villagers, he said, had begun changing what they previously said about Miraj.
“Day and night, people in the village cannot sleep,” he told Waadaa. “They [Coast Guard and police] attack the homes of innocent people, break houses and doors, file cases and threaten people, telling them not to give evidence."
"The Coast Guard threatens many people in our village.”
The Coast Guard has denied involvement in Miraj’s disappearance and has said allegations against the force are unsupported.
But the atmosphere described by villagers has become part of the unresolved question…what really happened to Miraj Sheikh?
Miraj, 30, disappeared on April 10. His family and several people who initially spoke about the incident said Coast Guard personnel took him away.
The Coast Guard has repeatedly denied detaining him and says it has no information about his whereabouts. Human Rights Watch has described the case as the first known alleged enforced disappearance in Bangladesh since the July 2024 uprising.
On July 12, the High Court directed law enforcement agencies to locate Miraj and produce him before the court.
Nearly six months later, he remains missing.
On June 11, hundreds of people gathered at a Coast Guard facility in the Joymoni area, demanding information about Miraj. The confrontation turned violent.
Coast Guard personnel and local residents were injured, according to reports at the time. Videos circulated showing Coast Guard personnel beating people during the unrest.
Two cases followed.
Atikur Rahman, officer-in-charge of Mongla police station, told Waadaa that one concerns an alleged blockade of the Coast Guard base at Dighraj and the obstruction of officers trying to leave after office hours. The other concerns an alleged attack and vandalism at the Coast Guard base in Joymoni.
The Coast Guard case named 44 people and several hundred unidentified people, according to police and contemporary reports.
Miraj’s mother, wife and sister were among those accused. For families in the area, the cases have added another layer of uncertainty.
Sajib said Musa was kept at Mongla police station after his arrest and sent to court the following morning. He said people in the village now worry that they, too, could suddenly be arrested.
“People cannot sleep peacefully, day or night,” he said.
Sajib said he sometimes stays away from the village at night because he fears arrest.
“I am an ordinary person. I am innocent,” he told Waadaa. “I only went there to watch and take photographs.”
Not everyone who spoke to Waadaa described the Coast Guard in the same terms.
Mohammad Sohel Sheikh, a BNP activist from Chila Union, said the force had done important work in the area, particularly against pirates.
“The Coast Guard has done a lot of good work by fighting the pirates,” he said. “But fascist elements within the force are at work.”
He believes the handling of Miraj’s case is one such instance and said the allegations surrounding the disappearance and treatment of villagers risk damaging the reputation of the wider force.
“One or two people’s actions can tarnish the whole force,” he said. If someone has committed a crime, Sohel said, the authorities should use the courts.
“If someone is a robber or a thief, there is a legal process,” he said. “There is no reason to beat him, kill him or make him disappear.”
Sohel was not present during the June 11 confrontation. He said he had travelled to Bagerhat with his brother for a court hearing and returned after hearing about the clash.
“Still, both of us brothers were named in that case,” he said. “As BNP activists, we suffered about 30 cases during Hasina, and we are still being implicated in fake cases.”
Other residents gave similar accounts of discovering that they had been named in the case despite saying they were elsewhere.
Tuhin Sheikh, a resident of Joymonir Ghol, said he was away on a Tabligh trip on June 11. He later saw a copy of the case circulating online and found his name among the accused.
“I was not there,” he said. “No one can prove that I was there because I wasn’t.”
Tuhin said he contacted local people to find out how his name had appeared. He also contacted a Coast Guard officer responsible for the Harbaria area.
According to Tuhin, the officer told him that if he had not been present and there was no evidence, including CCTV footage, showing his involvement, he should not face trouble. Police also told him the allegations would be verified.
The investigation remains open, Atikur said. Charges would be brought against those found to have been involved, he added.
There is a dispute about what happened on the evening of April 10.
Miraj’s family says he was taken from near a tea stall close to the Coast Guard’s Harbaria station in Joymonir Ghol. Some people initially gave accounts supporting the family’s allegation.
Several later changed or qualified what they had said.
Al-Amin, the owner of the tea stall where Miraj was allegedly last seen, appeared in a video giving an account that implicated the Coast Guard.
On June 11, Al-Amin was named as accused No 5 in a case filed under several sections of the Penal Code and Section 6 of the Anti-Terrorism Act. Miraj’s wife, mother and sister were also accused.
The complainant, M Saifur Rahman Pramanik of Coast Guard Base Dighraj, alleged that the accused obstructed the Coast Guard from carrying out its duties, sought to damage the force’s reputation and property, created panic and disrupted public security.
Al-Amin later withdrew his earlier account. He told Times of Bangladesh that he had falsely implicated the Coast Guard and that Miraj had not been taken from his shop.
When Waadaa asked Al-Amin about the criminal case, he said he did not know that his name appeared in one. He did not respond when Waadaa called again with the case number and other details.
Other accounts have shifted as well. Miraj’s sister, Liza Islam, says those changes did not occur in isolation.
She alleges that after the June confrontation, villagers were pressured and some were taken away, questioned and filmed. The Coast Guard denies involvement in Miraj’s disappearance and has rejected allegations against the force.
Liza said the changes occurred after she, her mother and her sister-in-law spent 27 days in jail in connection with the June cases.
She also alleges that some media organisations later approached villagers in ways that reinforced an alternative account: that Miraj might have disappeared voluntarily or that someone other than the Coast Guard was responsible.
The competing accounts have since become a dispute not only over what happened to Miraj, but over how the evidence surrounding his disappearance has been reported.
On September 9, Times of Bangladesh published a report by journalist Kamran Reza Chowdhury under the headline “Miraj Shaikh: Enforced or wilful disappearance?”
The report questioned the allegation that Miraj had been forcibly disappeared by the Coast Guard, citing inconsistencies in family accounts, later statements from witnesses, call records and an alleged telephone conversation involving a forest gang leader.
Kamran reported that he had found no one who said they personally witnessed Miraj being taken away. His report gave significant weight to later accounts from people who had previously been cited as supporting the allegation against the Coast Guard.
Among them was Al-Amin.
Kamran quoted Al-Amin as saying that Miraj had not been taken from his shop and that his earlier statement implicating the Coast Guard was false. Al-Amin told him that Liza had encouraged him to make the earlier statement.
But Waadaa found that the chronology surrounding those changes raises a question that cannot be resolved simply by choosing between the two versions.
Al-Amin had given an earlier account implicating the Coast Guard. He was subsequently named in the June 11 criminal case filed by a Coast Guard officer. He later withdrew his original account.
Selina Begum’s account also changed.
Earlier accounts attributed to Selina said she had seen people identifying themselves as Coast Guard personnel take Miraj away. When Kamran interviewed her in late August, however, she said she had been at home, had not seen Miraj being taken and had merely heard about it from children.
Nazmul Hawlader, known locally as Nazmul Member, presents another discrepancy.
In a recorded telephone conversation with Liza reviewed by The Dissent, Nazmul said Miraj had been taken by the Coast Guard. When Kamran interviewed him later, Nazmul said he had neither witnessed the incident nor heard of anyone who had seen Coast Guard personnel take Miraj.
Kamran’s report documented the later denials. It did not establish why these accounts changed or independently resolve which versions were accurate.
That distinction matters because the changed accounts were among the evidence used to question the family’s allegation.
The Dissent subsequently challenged Kamran’s reporting. Its reporter, Hasan Al Manjur, argued that the central issue was not whether journalists were entitled to question Miraj’s family, but whether the later accounts used to challenge the family had been subjected to the same scrutiny.
“Journalists have every right to question the family and the rights activists,” Manjur told Waadaa. “The question is whether the same scrutiny was applied to the changed witness accounts and the evidence being used to challenge the family’s version.”
Waadaa’s review of Kamran’s report identified two other evidentiary questions.
One concerns statements taken from Miraj’s family during the Coast Guard’s own inquiry.
Kamran cited an August 11 statement by Miraj’s mother, Taslima Begum, which he said was given to the Coast Guard in the presence of a police officer.
The statement said Taslima was in Mongla when Miraj disappeared and referred to an earlier financial dispute involving Miraj and a local man named Faruk.
Waadaa reported in August that Coast Guard officers had questioned Miraj’s mother, wife and sister at Mongla police station. The women acknowledged answering questions but said important parts of their accounts had been omitted from the statements that were recorded.
Kamran has defended his acquisition of the document, saying journalists have a right to protect confidential sources.The source of the document, however, is separate from the question of how its contents were assessed.
The statement was recorded as part of an inquiry conducted by the Coast Guard — the same force whose personnel are accused by Miraj’s family of taking him. The family disputes the completeness of the recorded statements.
Kamran’s report did not establish through independent evidence that Taslima’s statement represented a complete account of what she told the inquiry.
The third issue concerns a telephone call.
Kamran reported that one of Miraj’s SIM cards remained active at 7:20 pm on April 10 and that call records showed a conversation at 7:21 pm with Chhoto Sumon, whom the report described as the leader of a forest-based gang.
Sumon told Kamran that Miraj possessed six lakh taka collected as ransom from the families of six kidnapped fishermen. According to Sumon, Miraj spoke to him that evening and said he was near the Mongla silo and heading toward the forest office at Chandpai.
Kamran cited the call as evidence supporting the possibility that Miraj had gone into hiding or had been taken by another group. In a later response to The Dissent, he stated that Miraj himself had spoken with the gang leader for six minutes after the alleged detention.
The call record establishes that a communication occurred between the numbers. The material presented in Kamran’s report, however, does not independently establish who was physically using Miraj’s phone at the time or verify what was said during the call.
The account of the conversation came from Sumon himself, who also alleged that Miraj was holding money belonging to his gang.
Those gaps leave three questions at the centre of Waadaa’s examination of the report.
Waadaa asked Kamran how he determined that the later accounts of Al-Amin, Selina and Nazmul were more reliable than their earlier versions implicating the Coast Guard, and whether he investigated why those accounts had changed before using them to challenge the disappearance allegation.
Waadaa also asked what steps he took to independently establish that the August 11 Coast Guard statement was a complete and accurate record of what Miraj’s mother had said, given that the family disputes the completeness of the statements recorded during the inquiry.
Waadaa asked what independent evidence established that Miraj himself — rather than another person in possession of his phone — participated in the 7:21 pm call, and what evidence verified the contents of the conversation beyond Sumon’s account.
Kamran had not responded to the questions and said he “invested a lot of time and energy to write the story” and added that he couldn’t his “precious time to discuss it again."
In a September 15 article responding to The Dissent, Kamran defended his reporting and said his investigation was intended to test the established account of Miraj’s disappearance rather than accept it as fact.
He said he had interviewed the relevant people, obtained call records and the Coast Guard statement, and raised alternative possibilities rather than reaching a conclusion about what happened to Miraj.
Nearly six months after Miraj disappeared, the police investigation has produced no publicly disclosed breakthrough.
Atikur, the Mongla police chief, told Waadaa there was no update he could provide.
The Coast Guard also continues to deny detaining Miraj.
Waadaa sought an update from the force about the investigation and the allegations surrounding the case. The Coast Guard said it had no new information.
For Miraj’s family, that remains the central fact.
No authority has publicly established where he went after April 10, who was responsible for his disappearance or whether he is alive.
Around Joymonir Ghol, meanwhile, the dispute over what happened has become more complicated. Witnesses have given competing accounts. Some of those who initially implicated the Coast Guard later withdrew or changed their statements. Villagers say they fear arrest and criminal cases. The Coast Guard denies wrongdoing.
Musa Sheikh is home after 33 days in jail. Miraj Sheikh is still missing.
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