The son of an 81-year-old Bangladeshi journalist who was arrested and detained on 16 April on suspicion of sedition says his father “wouldn’t kill a mosquito”.
Police say there is evidence linking Shafik Rehman, a prominent figure in Bangladesh who holds dual British citizenship, to a conspiracy to murder Sajeeb Wazed Joy, the son of Bangladesh’s prime minister, Sheikh Hasina.
For many years Rehman edited a mass-circulation Bengali newspaper and has also worked as a speechwriter for Hasina’s arch-rival, Khaleda Zia, leader of the opposition Bangladesh Nationalist party. Before his arrest he was editing a popular monthly magazine and chaired a pro-opposition thinktank.
Rehman’s UK-based son Shumit told the Guardian he was adamant of his father’s innocence and that the alleged conspiracy was “completely farcical”.
Shumit Rehman, 57, said his father had told him he had been approached in the US in 2011 by a man claiming he had details of Sajeeb Wazed Joy’s financial affairs, which had been obtained from an FBI agent who had sold the man the information.
“My dad met him in America with a view to using the documents,” Shumit said. “Both the FBI agent and the man who bought the information were arrested in 2013 and sent to jail in America. When the Bangladeshi man was released, for some reason the story evolved into one about a plot to kidnap the prime minister’s son.
“Then all of a sudden, on 16 April this year, a group of men came to my father’s house in Bangladesh posing as a TV camera crew.
“They later declared they were actually from the Bangladesh investigation bureau and were arresting him on a charge of plotting to kidnap and kill the prime minister’s son. He was taken to remand, which means you have no access to a lawyer or visitor rights or anything, for five or six days. He was brought back to the court for about 10 minutes, where police said they would remand him for another five days.”
On Wednesday Shafik Rehman was sent to prison following a hearing in Dhaka. Shumit said he hadn’t spoken to his father since his arrest, which came “completely out of the blue”.
“My mum basically waved at him for 10 minutes in the courtroom. We’re both extremely worried. The normal case, if he was not so well known and not so old, is that he would be tortured until confessing. We’re hoping that his fame will save him, but there’s a danger it could have the opposite effect. He wouldn’t kill a mosquito.”
Rehman is the third pro-opposition editor to be detained in Bangladesh since 2013. Khaleda Zia has demanded his unconditional release, saying his arrest was an attempt by the government to distract the population from its “terrible misrule”.
His arrest comes against a backdrop of a series of killings of secular bloggers and publishers by radical Islamists, and growing concern about press freedom and freedom of speech.
In the latest incident, on Monday, the editor of the country’s only lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender magazine, and his friend, an actor and fellow gay rights activist, were hacked to death in Dhaka. Critics have accused Hasina’s Awami League government of failing to act effectively to stop the carnage.
“This government has been arresting a lot of journalists [and] we have the worst freedom of expression, second only to Russia,” Shumit said. “My father’s always been very careful to just tread along the lines, never go into defamation or anything like that. The other editors and journalists have been arrested for such things but this prime minister has never been able to get a hold of my Dad. This would be the only way to shut him up, and it’s personal.
“Many of the opposition party’s writers and advisers have been jailed, another editor has been on remand now for three years – 10 days at a time, with no access to visitors and lawyers.”
Shumit said his mother was extremely upset: “They are about to have their 57th wedding anniversary. She’s not your typical Bangladeshi stay-at-home mum. She was a deputy headteacher in England, she runs an NGO called Democracy Watch in Bangladesh, she’s got a very high profile herself.”
He described his father as “the most British sort of Bangladeshi you’ll find … he went to every England home game when they won the World Cup, he loves Monty Python, Fellini, Woody Allen, he has a cinema club in Bangladesh. He’s very cultured. He was also a chartered accountant in England, which he gave up when writing started to take over.”
