MD MEHEDI HASAN

The neighborhood was quiet, the streets still washed in the pale early‑morning light. Just after the Fajr prayers on October 30, 2017, Abdur Rahman stepped out of the Baridhara DOHS mosque for his usual morning walk.

As he walked along the familiar route in his pajamas and T‑shirt, a white microbus pulled up a few feet from him. It had no number plate.

Two men climbed out of the vehicle and began following him. Before Rahman could react, two more men emerged from the same microbus, almost blocking his path. The group, all of them powerfully built, ordered him to get into the car.

When Rahman, then an independent director at the now-defunct Social Islami Bank Ltd (SIBL), refused, the four men closed in, grabbed him, and forced him into the microbus.

Around the same time, roughly 10 kilometers away, a black car stopped outside Humayun Kabir’s home in Uttara. Kabir, then the board secretary of SIBL, was in the shower when he heard urgent knocking.

“People from the administration are downstairs, looking for you,” his wife called through the bathroom door.

Kabir came down to find four to five men in plainclothes. They identified themselves as members of an intelligence agency.

He recalled that when they told him to come with them, his wife protested. The men brushed her aside, and after issuing veiled threats, forced him into their car.

Meanwhile, inside the moving vehicle, Abdur Rahman soon realised where he was: this was a car belonging to an intelligence agency. After a short drive, the men escorted him into a large office compound in Kachukhet, inside the Dhaka Cantonment. It was the office of the Directorate of Forces Intelligence (DGFI).

“That was the worst experience of my life,” Rahman told The Daily Star. “I had no mobile phone, I couldn’t call my family. My wife and daughters went from hospital to hospital and police stations.”

Like Rahman, Humayun Kabir was also taken to the same intelligence office.

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