KHALED HOSSAIN SOHEL

Khaled Hossain Sohel was the President of Jatiyatabadi Chhatra Dal-JCD, student wing of Bangladesh Nationalist Party-BNP, Sutrapur, Dhaka. 

On the morning of November 28, Samarat Molla, Khaled Hossain Sohel, and four other Bangladesh Nationalist Party-BNP supporters went to the Dhaka Central Jail to visit their mutual friend Sonjoy. All of them lived in Sutrapur, a neighborhood in Old Dhaka.

The men reached the prison in two groups at around 11 am. In order to enter the jail, the men had to hand over their phones, for which they were each given tokens to retrieve them upon exit. Sohel’s wife, Shami Sultana, said that the manager in charge of holding the phones told Sohel’s brother that some men had come and confiscated the six phones, telling the manager that they were from the Detective Branch-DB.

A day before he was picked up, police had visited Sohel’s house in Bangla Bazar where he usually lived with his wife. The BNP student activist, who according to his family had no criminal cases filed against him, was residing elsewhere in order to avoid arrest. After the police left the house, Sohel’s wife, Sayeed Shammi Sultana, said she phoned her husband to warn him.

Sultana discovered her husband was missing after his colleague, Selim Reza Pintu, said that Sohel’s phone was not reachable. Fearing he had been arrested, family members and friends started contacting different police stations. The following day, Sultana lodged a missing person complaint with the Chawk Bazar Police Station.

Molla’s family heard that the men had been picked up by law enforcement authorities late at night on November 28 when they received a call from a friend. His family said that the police delayed filing a general diary, at one point an officer allegedly told his brother, “You did not tell us that your brother was involved in politics! So, no GD! Molla’s family was finally able to file a general diary in 2016, but only on condition that they referred to Molla as ‘missing’ and wouldn’t mention anything about law enforcement.

Sultana said that at DB headquarters officers denied the men were in their custody. “The first question the police asked was whether they had any political affiliations. They seemed reluctant to speak to us and told us not to hang around here,” she said. She said she and other family members continued to visit the DB office. “The last time we went was the tenth day after they were taken [December 8], and were told not to bother coming. On December 8, three of the friends who had been taken with Sohel were released.

In May 2014, six months after the men disappeared, the police set up a 40-member anti-kidnapping team, and Sultana lodged a complaint with the team. Soon after, she met with an additional deputy commissioner of police who put her in touch with an official from the DB. However, both families have received no further information about the whereabouts or fate of Molla or Sohel.

Meanwhile Molla’s and Sohel’s families say that the police continue to harass them, coming by and accusing them of hiding the two disappeared men.