The Bangladesh Nationalist Party’s Assistant General Secretary, and a former Minister of State in the last Khaleda Zia regime, Salahuddin Ahmed, was found aimlessly moving around in Meghalaya’s capital Shillong in the wee hours of May 11.
Bizarre as the story sounds, Ahmed was found by early morning walkers in the upmarket Golf Links locality of Shillong. Confirming that a “Bangladeshi citizen” was detained, Shillong SP Vivek Syiem told The Quint over phone that the walkers found the man in a dazed state and indisposed to respond to questions.
“They informed us immediately and the police found him loitering around. His speech was incoherent and garbled. He had no travel papers on him, making a positive identification difficult,” Syiem said.
The Ghost of Christmas Past
The SP said the man he admitted is a Bangladeshi national and that his name is Salahudin Ahmed. “But we have not interrogated him so far because he had to be hospitalised after a psychiatric examination which concluded that he was mentally stable and sound,” Syiem said, adding that the ministry of external affairs had been informed and that the Intelligence Bureau and the Research and Analysis Wing, India’s external intelligence agency, would step in to question Ahmed once he is discharged from hospital.
Ahmed, a former private secretary to BNP chief Begum Khaleda Zia, rose to become the party’s assistant general secretary and was more recently appointed a spokesman who sent out press releases to Bangladeshi media houses from an undisclosed location in that country. He began functioning as a BNP spokesperson following the arrest of party secretary general Mirza Fakhrul Islam Alamgir and joint secretary general Ruhul Kabir Ahmed Rizvi.
Ahmed reportedly went missing from March 10 when, his wife alleged, plainclothes securitymen picked him up from a house in the posh Uttara area of Dhaka.
Speaking to news-persons in Dhaka, Ahmed’s spouse Hasina alleged that the Uttara and Gulshan police stations had refused to file a complaint over her husband going missing. She subsequently moved court which ordered the law enforcement authorities to trace Ahmed and produce him in court. Hasina, a former BNP MP, submitted two memoranda to the Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s office, seeking her intervention to trace Salahuddin.
Incognito in India
The sudden and inexplicable discovery of Ahmed in Shillong has raised disturbing questions. Was he clandestinely pushed into India by Bangladeshi security officials? If so, why? Was he drugged and then pushed across the international boundary Meghalaya shares with Bangladesh? How did the Border Security Force and Indian intelligence fail to detect such movement? Were they at all aware that Ahmed was missing for two months?
Ahmed spoke with his wife over phone from Shillong on Tuesday, which has considerably eased the intense tension she underwent for two months. The role of Bangladesh’s security agencies in Salahuddin’s disappearance two months ago cannot be ruled out at this point in time, and this should be of some interest to Indian intelligence.
There is a history of Opposition leaders in Bangladesh crossing over the international border and seeking refuge in India. When the Awami League was in Opposition, some of its leaders took shelter in various parts of India such as Agartala and Kolkata, with the full knowledge, and sometimes, the active support and connivance of Indian intelligence agencies.
At least one senior Jatiya Party leader and a minister in the erstwhile cabinet of Lt Gen Hussein Mohammad Ershad lived in Kolkata under an assumed identity, but subsequently returned to Bangladesh. This time around, Indian intelligence may just have been caught napping.
(At The Quint, we are answerable only to our audience. Play an active role in shaping our journalism by becoming a member. Because the truth is worth it.)