On Saturday, Mukta Khatun sat inside an auditorium at the National Museum in Dhaka and listened to Bangladesh’s home minister describe what it was like to return from an enforced disappearance.
Salahuddin Ahmed spoke about the first telephone call he made to his wife after he resurfaced in India during Sheikh Hasina’s rule. His wife screamed when she heard his voice. Until then, she had not known whether he was alive.
Mukta knew the story. Salahuddin’s disappearance had become one of the better-known cases from the Sheikh Hasina years. But she had come to the programme, organised by Mayer Daak, for another reason.
Her husband, Miraj Sheikh, had been missing for nearly five months.
Miraj’s mother, Taslima Begum, and his sister, Liza Islam, were sitting with her. The three women say Miraj was taken by Coast Guard personnel near Joymonir Ghol in Mongla on April 10. The Coast Guard has denied detaining him.
After discussing his own disappearance, Salahuddin addressed theirs.
“An independent investigation has been conducted into the incident involving Miraj Sheikh, but the investigation found no evidence of the involvement of any force,” he said.
The home minister then offered a possible alternative explanation. Miraj, he suggested, may have disappeared because of a dispute involving rival groups of pirates operating around the Sundarbans.
The women listened from the audience.
Later, Mukta tried to work out what the minister’s statement meant for her family.
“It hurts,” she told Daily Waadaa. “We are the victim’s family. We were put in jail, and we were subjected to a lot of harassment. We have no security now; we are afraid.”
Then she asked a question she has increasingly found difficult to answer.
“If the home minister himself says this about us, then where are we supposed to go?” Taslima was more direct.
“My son was taken away by the Coast Guard,” she said. “Why would we lie about that?”
For months, the women had been trying to persuade the state to investigate their allegation. Now one of the country’s most senior ministers was publicly saying the state had investigated and essentially rejected it.
“He is the minister, yet he is saying these things,” Taslima told Waadaa, “Instead of finding my son and bringing him back, when he says these things, doesn’t that make me feel bad? Tell me. I have only one son.”
The disappearance of Miraj, who was 30 when he vanished, has become a complicated test for a government whose senior ranks include people who were themselves subjected to disappearance and political persecution during Hasina’s rule.
Human Rights Watch, citing eyewitness accounts, has described Miraj’s case as the first known enforced disappearance in Bangladesh since the July 2024 uprising.
In July, the High Court ordered law-enforcement agencies to locate Miraj and produce him before the court. They have not produced him. Nor has the government publicly established what happened to him.
What has changed instead is the story surrounding his disappearance.
The family’s account initially appeared straightforward.
Miraj disappeared on April 10 in Mongla, near the Sundarbans. His relatives said Coast Guard personnel had taken him. Local witnesses supported parts of their account.
The Coast Guard denied having Miraj in custody.
Over the following months, however, some of the witnesses began saying something different.
People who had previously spoken about Coast Guard involvement told television journalists that Miraj had not been taken by the force. In some cases, they alleged that members of Miraj’s family had persuaded or managed them to make their earlier statements.
Among them was Al Amin, a tea-shop owner whom the family considered one of its most important witnesses. When Waadaa later asked Al Amin about his statements, he did not provide a simple explanation for the discrepancy.
“In this age of media, you never know what might happen to something you say,” he said. “We are simple people; we don’t understand all these things. Sometimes I myself cannot tell where something was said or what exactly I said. You understand, brother?”
For investigators, contradictory witnesses present an obvious problem. For Miraj’s family, the reason for the contradictions is also part of the case. They say the witnesses became afraid.
“Our witnesses are not giving statements anymore,” Mukta said. “People who initially gave statements have now changed them.”
She described Al Amin as an example.
“Al Amin gave his statement at the beginning and was one of our main witnesses,” she said. “Then, after all these things happened — after the human rights people came, after the cases were filed over the protest, after the Coast Guard intimidated people — he changed his statement.”
The family says the atmosphere in the area changed substantially after a confrontation in June.
According to Mukta, local residents protested after Coast Guard personnel assaulted members of Miraj’s family. Criminal cases followed. She said residents were pressured and that an underage boy from their village remains in jail in connection with one of the cases.
Mukta, Taslima and Liza were themselves jailed for 27 days after the Coast Guard called in police following the confrontation, according to the family.
Liza says something else was happening to the witnesses.
“The reason everyone has changed their statements is that the Coast Guard brought villagers to the member’s depot room, detained them there, took their statements on video and in writing, and made them sign,” she said.
“Everyone was forced to do it out of fear.”
Waadaa could not independently verify her account. Waadaa contacted multiple officials from the Coast Guard. But none of them said anything on record.
But the question of how freely people in the area were speaking has become important because those statements now form part of a competing public narrative about what happened to Miraj.
Nur Khan Liton went to Mongla to examine that question for himself.
Liton, a veteran human-rights activist and former member of the Commission of Inquiry on Enforced Disappearances, spoke with residents and examined the circumstances surrounding the case.
He came away unconvinced that the allegation against the Coast Guard could be dismissed.
“My initial suspicion is that the allegation of Coast Guard involvement in the incident involving Miraj Sheikh cannot be ruled out,” he said.
Liton said the conditions in the area made witness testimony particularly difficult to assess.
“Based on the kind of fear and intimidation that law-enforcement agencies, particularly the Coast Guard, have created in the area in connection with the subsequent cases, and the way people have been harassed, we have received allegations of torture in some cases,” he told Waadaa.
“So there is no environment here in which people can give independent testimony. It is impossible.”
As the witnesses changed their accounts, television reports began presenting a different version of Miraj’s disappearance.
Then questions emerged about how some of those reports had been produced.
An investigation by The Dissent examined reporting by Ekhon TV and Nagorik Protidin. It reported that journalists from the two outlets travelled together to Bagerhat and used Coast Guard boats during their reporting trip.
Citing multiple sources, The Dissent also reported that the Coast Guard arranged transportation, accommodation and other expenses for the journalists.
The allegations did not establish that the journalists had fabricated their reports or coerced witnesses. But they raised questions about the independence of reporting on a case in which the Coast Guard itself was the subject of the central allegation.
Nagorik Protidin said it would review its reports after criticism spread on social media.
Shahriar Zaman Dip, a special correspondent for Ekhon TV, defended his reporting when contacted by Waadaa.
“We went there and presented their accounts,” he told Waadaa. “We did not put forward our own account.”
He also pointed out that The Dissent had not accused his team of coercing anyone.
“Nowhere in The Dissent’s report do they say that we pressured anyone or forced anyone to give a statement,” he said.
Shahriar disputed the implication that his team had travelled with the Coast Guard, arguing that residents would have seen them arriving if they had.
Mukta says that is precisely what happened. She told Waadaa that she saw the journalists arrive aboard a Coast Guard boat.
“If they had come to speak with us on our side, they would not have come on a Coast Guard boat,” she said.
The family declined to speak with them. For Liza, the changing witness testimony and subsequent media reports form part of the same process.
“I definitely think there is a coordinated effort to destroy our character,” she said.
That allegation has not been independently established.
But by late August, the dispute over Miraj’s disappearance was no longer simply between a family and a security agency.
There were now two versions of events, competing witnesses and competing media accounts.
Then the home minister publicly endorsed one conclusion: no security force was involved.
Salahuddin Ahmed described the inquiry into Miraj’s disappearance as independent. What he did not present at the event was the investigation itself. Liton said that should be the next step.
“If an investigation has been conducted, the government should publish that report,” he said.
Doing so could answer basic questions that remain unresolved: Who conducted the inquiry? Which witnesses were interviewed? Were members of the Coast Guard questioned?
Were telephone records, location data, surveillance footage or operational logs examined? How did investigators assess witnesses who had given contradictory statements? And on what evidence did they conclude that no security force was involved?
Without the report, the public has the minister’s conclusion but not the evidence underlying it, said the Human Rights experts. The government’s explanation nevertheless goes beyond simply denying Coast Guard involvement.
Salahuddin told the Mayer Daak arranged gathering that joint forces had been carrying out operations against pirates and forest robbers in the Sundarbans and coastal areas. Those operations had created pressure on criminal groups, he said.
“There are also many groups of pirates here,” Salahuddin said. “One group is against another. The incident involving Miraj Sheikh may have been such a case.”
He also referred to a pontoon that he said had been installed by Miraj’s associates and used to collect provisions from the sea before supplying them to pirates.
According to the minister, the Coast Guard removed the pontoon, creating resentment. An attack on a Coast Guard office followed. Allegations that the Coast Guard had taken Miraj emerged afterward, he said.
The family disputes that account.
“The pontoon he was talking about — wasn’t that the Coast Guard’s pontoon?” Mukta said. “It was the Coast Guard’s pontoon, not the pirates’.” More fundamentally, she said allegations about her husband’s activities did not resolve the question of what happened to him.
“If there is any case against him, if he has committed any offence, the law and the courts will punish him,” she told Waadaa.
“If there is a case, let the police arrest him and take legal action. But why would he be disappeared?”
Salahuddin has said the government could establish a neutral and independent commission if necessary.
That leaves two positions sitting uneasily beside each other: the government says an independent investigation has already found no involvement by security forces, while also leaving open the possibility of another independent inquiry.
To Liton, what is happening around Miraj recalls another case. In 2011, members of the Rapid Action Battalion shot Limon Hossain, then 16, in Jhalakathi. His injuries were so severe that doctors amputated his left leg.
RAB subsequently portrayed Limon as a criminal.
The account was challenged by Limon, his family and rights organisations. As the dispute continued, some people who had initially supported Limon’s version later changed their accounts.
“From my own experience, what I feel is that in the Limon case, some of the people who initially gave testimony later changed their accounts because of the environment and circumstances,” Liton said.
“There was a role played by RAB in that matter.”
He sees the possibility of the same dynamic developing around Miraj: an allegation against a security force, criminal allegations surrounding the victim, frightened witnesses and an official narrative gradually hardening before the underlying facts have been independently established.
Whether the two cases are comparable ultimately depends on what happened to Miraj. Five months after his disappearance, that remains unknown.
At the same time, Parliament is considering legislation intended to prevent cases like Miraj’s.
The Enforced Disappearance Prevention and Redress Act 2026 would formally criminalise enforced disappearance, establish penalties, recognise command responsibility and provide compensation and other remedies for victims and their families.
It would fill a major gap in Bangladeshi law. But the proposed investigation mechanism has drawn criticism from rights advocates.
Under the current draft, the National Human Rights Commission would not have an independent investigative role in disappearance cases. Investigations would remain largely within the law-enforcement system.
The government has argued that when members of one agency are accused, another agency or an inter-agency team can investigate.
Rights advocates say that arrangement does not resolve the underlying conflict: the state security system would remain responsible for investigating allegations against the state security system.
“Miraj’s case provides a practical example of this conflict,” said Nur Khan Liton.
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