Miraj Sheikh: Fear of disappearance returns
As Bangladesh marked the International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances on Sunday, with officials and campaigners renewing pledges that the secret detentions of the Sheikh Hasina era would never return, the case of a missing fisherman from the country’s southwestern coast has emerged as an early test of whether that promise can hold.
Miraj Sheikh, a fisherman and motorcycle driver from Bagerhat district near the Sundarbans, has not been seen since the evening of April 10, according to his family, rights groups and multiple media reports.
Witnesses, including his wife, say he was taken from a tea stall in Joymonir Hat, near Mongla, by men who identified themselves as members of the Bangladesh Coast Guard, handcuffed and led to a waiting speedboat carrying several uniformed personnel.
Human Rights Watch, the New York-based advocacy group, first drew international attention to the case in a statement issued July 19, describing it as the first known alleged enforced disappearance in Bangladesh since the mass uprising that toppled Sheikh Hasina’s government in 2024.
Citing multiple eyewitnesses, the group said Coast Guard members detained Sheikh at Joymonir Hat and put him on a speedboat.
When his family went to the Coast Guard office in Digraj, in Mongla, the following day, they said they were initially told he was on “an operation” and asked to return that afternoon – only to be told, when they came back, that he had never been there.
Several other news outlets, including Daily Waadaa, BBC Bangla and Deutsche Welle, have separately reported similar eyewitness accounts.
An investigation by The Dissent also documented what it described as harassment by Coast Guard personnel of Miraj Sheikh’s family and neighbors after they protested his disappearance.
Sheikh’s wife, Mukta Khatun, has said she initially reached individuals she believed to be Coast Guard members who acknowledged that her husband was being held for questioning. But when she went to the Digraj camp the next day, officials denied any knowledge of him – a position the authorities have maintained since.
Local police, the family said, initially refused to record a General Diary on the case, only doing so weeks later, and then classified the episode simply as a disappearance from his home rather than an abduction.
Family members and villagers who protested peacefully were met with baton charges, according to accounts collected by rights groups, and counter-cases were later filed against the family and hundreds of others under anti-terrorism laws.
Nur Khan Liton, a longtime rights activist who traveled to Mongla to look into the case, said the eyewitness testimony and other evidence he had reviewed pointed to Coast Guard involvement. He also said Coast Guard personnel had intimidated potential witnesses.
The Human Rights Support Society and BLAST, two rights organizations, have since taken up Mr. Sheikh’s case, and the High Court has issued a writ ordering authorities to produce him within 15 days.
As of Sunday, his whereabouts remained unknown. At the center of the family’s wait is his seven-year-old son, Mahin.
The government has offered a different account. On Saturday, at an event organized by Mayer Daak, a platform for families of the disappeared, ahead of Sunday’s international day of observance, Home Minister Salahuddin Ahmed – who has himself spoken publicly about being forcibly disappeared before the 2024 uprising – recalled the emotion of his first phone call with his family after his own ordeal. Sheikh’s family was in the audience.
Ahmed then told the gathering that an “independent investigation” had found no evidence that any security force was involved in Sheikh’s disappearance.
He raised an alternative explanation instead, suggesting that rival gangs operating in the coastal region could have been behind the fisherman’s disappearance amid conflict among them.
Rights activists have dismissed that theory as implausible, given the eyewitness accounts placing Sheikh in Coast Guard custody.
For campaigners who spent years demanding accountability for disappearances under the previous government, the government’s handling of the Miraj Sheikh case has become a pointed test case.
Bangladesh’s post-uprising political order was built in part on a promise that the practices of the Hasina era – plainclothes abductions, secret detention sites, official denials – would not persist under new leadership.
Rights advocates say the state’s response so far, more than four months after Sheikh went missing, has done little to reassure them that promise is being kept.
Sheikh’s family, for its part, says it is still waiting for the phone call the home minister described receiving after his own disappearance – the one confirming that a missing man is alive and coming home.
