The detention of journalist Mizanur Rahman Sohel without a warrant, complaint, or any stated cause once again exposes a chronic and deeply corrosive policing problem: the routine misuse of state power to harass, intimidate and unlawfully confine citizens.
What is most alarming is the sheer casualness with which the head of the Detective Branch (DB) ordered a midnight operation to “bring in” a journalist for a supposed conversation. The suggestion that such a discussion could not wait until daylight is not only absurd, it is a mockery of due process. Sohel was neither a fugitive nor a violent offender. Yet a DB team stormed his home after midnight, forcing him to DB office.
More gravely, he was held at the DB office for ten hours, without explanation, before being returned to his distraught wife. One can only imagine the fear and helplessness of his family as they waited through the night, denied information and unable to reach officer Ashraful—who had assured them of Sohel’s prompt return.
According to media reports, five or six men identifying themselves as DB officers entered the home shortly after 12:00am, asking Sohel to accompany them while refused to produce a warrant. This is not policing; this is abduction under the colour of the law.
That the DB chief—an office long tarnished by allegations of unlawful detention and extrajudicial abuse—has chosen to follow the well-worn path of his predecessors, Harun-or-Rashid and Monirul Islam, only underscores how normalised these violations have become.
The July uprising remains a vivid reminder: Harun picked up student leaders at will under political orders, holding them incommunicado for days. Monirul routinely confined both innocent and suspected individuals for months, later producing them as freshly arrested in concocted cases.
In Sohel’s case, there was plainly no urgency. He lived within a few kilometres distance of the DB office; if a conversation was truly required, it could have occurred in broad daylight. Ten hours of detention is not a conversation—it is coercion. And the DB chief has conspicuously failed to explain the real motive.
Allegations have already surfaced that Faiz Ahmad Taiyeb, special assistant to the ICT adviser, orchestrated the detention to favour a clique of nine mobile-phone businessmen. Taiyeb has denied the claim, but denial alone does not settle the matter—particularly when Sohel himself stated on Facebook that he was picked up at the behest of a government adviser to enable this monopoly.
The DB chief’s subsequent explanation to the press—that Sohel had “mistakenly provided his mobile number on an invitation card” and was therefore taken in—is insulting and unacceptable. His shifting narratives to different media outlets further erode credibility. To Prothom Alo, he claimed Sohel was brought in to “talk about an issue”, without elaboration. The assertion that the incident was a “misunderstanding” is unjustifiable.
Sohel was not the only target. DB officers also detained Abu Saeed Pias, secretary of the Mobile Business Community of Bangladesh at 3:00am in a similar nocturnal raid, holding him for 15 hours.
These are not isolated incidents; they reflect a decades-long pattern in which arbitrary detention has become standard operating procedure for law-enforcement agencies under successive governments. The law is explicit: a citizen can only be arrested on the basis of specific written complaints or charges. By that measure, the detentions of Sohel and Pias were unequivocally unlawful.
Those responsible must be held to account. Without departmental action and legal consequences, the cycle of abuse will continue in future.
