Missing Miraj was ‘with the police’
Nearly five months after Miraj Sheikh vanished from Mongla, the government maintains it has no information on his whereabouts and continues to deny that any security agency is holding him.
That official position was thrown into fresh doubt this week after a sitting lawmaker briefly suggested otherwise, according to reporting by the Daily Waadaa.
Azizul Bari Helal, the BNP MP for Khulna-4, said during journalist Khaled Mohiuddin’s online programme on Tuesday night that Miraj was “with the police.” The remark immediately raised a pointed question:
if that were true, why had he not been produced before a court, as the law requires?
Helal walked the statement back within a day. In a message to reporters, he called it an unintentional error and said he had already corrected the record during a later appearance on BanglaVision, the Daily Waadaa reported.
The retraction has not settled anything. Mongla’s police chief, Atikur Rahman, told the outlet he had not seen the broadcast and that police had no information regarding Miraj. Reporters also sought comment from Police Headquarters and the Home Ministry before Helal’s clarification, but neither responded, according to the Daily Waadaa.
A Family Left With More Questions
For Miraj’s relatives, Helal’s comment – retracted or not – is simply the latest in a string of contradictory signals from officials.
His sister, Liza Islam, spoke to reporters after returning from a court appearance in Bagerhat, where she, her mother and her sister-in-law had just answered a case filed by the Coast Guard. The three women had spent 27 days in jail in connection with that case, per the Daily Waadaa’s account.
Liza said she had no way of knowing whether the MP’s original claim reflected real information or was simply a mistake, and described the family as caught between shifting official narratives – one thing from the home minister, another from a lawmaker, with no clarity in between.
Her demand, she said, is simple: if her brother is in police custody, the authorities should say so and bring him before a court, as required by law. The family has said all along that Coast Guard personnel took Miraj on April 10, an allegation the Coast Guard has denied.
Court Order, and a Landmark Designation
In July, the High Court directed authorities to locate Miraj and produce him before the court, the Daily Waadaa noted. Human Rights Watch has identified his case as the first reported enforced disappearance in Bangladesh since the fall of Sheikh Hasina’s government – a designation that has kept international attention on how the case unfolds.
Helal’s comment, even retracted, does not confirm that Miraj was ever held by police. But it has added one more version of events to a case in which the state has yet to offer a consistent public account.
Calls Grow for an Independent Inquiry
Dr Nabila Idris, a former member of the Commission of Inquiry on Enforced Disappearances, told the Daily Waadaa that the mounting contradictions have put the government “in an embarrassing position,” with officials at different levels offering accounts that don’t line up.
She argued that an independent investigation with real authority is the only way to establish what actually happened to Miraj and make those findings public – a step that would also shield the broader government from having to answer for the actions of a few individuals, if that is in fact what happened.
Any wrongdoing, she suggested, may be confined to a small number of people, and there could be mitigating circumstances that simply haven’t come to light because no such inquiry has been allowed to happen.
An independent probe, she said, would serve two purposes at once: protecting victims and protecting the institutions involved from open-ended suspicion.
