Alone in the dark: The nightmare of Bangladesh's secret underground prison

Dhaka, Bangladesh: When his jailers barged in before dawn, the captive thought it was the end.

For eight years, he had been held in a windowless cell of an underground prison, dark night without end. Now, the guards ordered him to finish his prayer, then removed the thick blindfold and metal handcuffs he had almost always worn and tied his wrists with cloth -- leaving nothing to incriminate them, he thought, if his body was later found floating in a river or lying in a ditch. They bundled their captive onto the floor of a minivan, hiding him under the weight of two men, and set out for an hour's drive.

But unlike many other political prisoners before him in Bangladesh, Mir Ahmad Quasem Arman was not being taken to his death and disposal. Instead, he said, he was dropped off in a barren field on the edge of Dhaka, the capital.

A lot had changed: new highway overpasses, a recently opened subway system. But Arman was unaware of the latest and biggest change of all. Sheikh Hasina, the prime minister who had ruled with an iron fist and vengeful designs for the past 15 years, had fled the country as protesters stormed her home.

With her exit on Aug 5 came the reappearance of Arman and two other men long confined in the secret prison.

Arman had been a spoiled and chubby-cheeked lawyer when he disappeared at the hands of paramilitary forces in 2016 -- under no criminal accusation himself, but seemingly held accountable for his father's decades as an Islamist activist and business magnate.

Years later, Arman stumbled back into the open as a shadow of his old self, skinny, with a wispy beard and thinning hair. The only thing that had kept him from spiraling into madness during all those years alone in the blackness was the thought of his wife and two young daughters, now 11 and 12.

"I prayed to God every time that 'I couldn't be with my family in this world, at least keep us together in heaven,'" Arman, 40, said.

While Hasina's downfall has given her country of 170 million people an opening to chart a new future, it has also lifted the veil on some of the worst abuses of Bangladesh's recent past. Once an embodiment of her nation's democratic longings, Hasina descended over time into autocracy, paranoia and repression, marshaling the state machinery to neutralize any challenge to her grip on power.

Embedded in that effort's deepest recesses was Hasina's program of enforced disappearances. Hundreds of people vanished without a trace after being abducted by her security forces, targeted in some cases over the smallest of political actions: organizing an opposition rally, blocking a road in protest or just posting an angry message on social media.

Many of the victims were killed and discarded. The rest were shut out of sight in an underground military detention center, pushed to the edge of insanity and death -- often for years on end -- but assiduously prevented from death itself.

That prison was code-named the House of Mirrors.

The Times pieced together the story of Hasina's secret detention program through interviews with more than two dozen people, including Arman and another man released in August, as well as survivors who had previously been forced into silence, current and former government officials and security chiefs, diplomats and human rights activists.

It is a story of families destroyed -- one of those released in August collapsed into repeated strokes after learning that his wife had remarried, believing him dead; another learned that his father had died after going door to door for years seeking clues to his disappearance.

Dozens of those who vanished remain unaccounted-for, their loved ones deprived of any sense of closure, even after braving years of government crackdowns and intimidation to hold vigils and protests. They want their sons and brothers to reappear, as the other three prisoners did. If that cannot happen, they want justice, to help close their own wounds, and those of their nation.

"What we want is an answer -- what happened?" said Tasnim Shipraa, whose uncle Belal Hossain vanished in 2013. "It's almost like he never existed in this world."

A Torturous History

To the outside world, Bangladesh was something of an economic miracle, with a garment export industry that lifted millions out of poverty and won admiration for Hasina as the strong, steady hand at the wheel.

But darker currents ran beneath the surface, rooted in the traumatic history of a 50-year-old nation born of two bloody partitions -- of Pakistan from India, then of Bangladesh from Pakistan -- and stuck ever since in a cycle of political violence and vengeance.

Hasina's father, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, helped guide Bangladesh to independence in 1971, after the Pakistani military had waged a brutal campaign against ethnic Bengalis that left hundreds of thousands dead.

But as Sheikh Mujib led the country in the years that followed, he became deeply paranoid, banning political parties and unleashing a ruthless paramilitary force against his opponents. In 1975, he and much of his family were killed in a military coup.

Hasina, who was abroad at the time, went into exile. When she returned years later, she was a breath of fresh air, eventually helping to end military rule and becoming prime minister for the first time in 1996.

Her defeat in the next election sent her to the sidelines for eight years. In 2004, she survived an assassination attempt in which grenade-hurling assailants killed two dozen people. During a later political crisis, she was detained on extortion charges. When she returned to office in 2009, she was a changed leader, paranoid and heavy-handed like her father.

Hasina employed a range of security forces in the campaign of repression that followed. For the work of killing and disposing of opponents, she turned to elite police and paramilitary units. One of them, the Rapid Action Batallion, had started as a counterterrorism squadron with U.S. and British training but was transformed by Hasina into what Human Rights Watch called an "in-house death squad."

In a particularly gruesome case, an official in Hasina's party paid the batallion's members to take out an adversary, according to court documents. When they went to pick the man up in broad daylight, they also rounded up any witness to the crime. The officers sedated seven people and strangled them, according to court testimony. To prepare the bodies to be dumped into a river, their abdomens were perforated to help them sink, and sacks of bricks were tied to them.

A week later, the bodies were found floating on the river, a clear sign that the Hasina regime's brutality had taken on a life of its own.

Secret long-term detentions were entrusted to the military's intelligence wing. More than 700 people were forcibly disappeared from 2009 to this year, according to estimates by human rights organizations. The true count is most likely far higher, they say, because frequent government harassment made it difficult for them to fully document the cases.

About 450 of the known disappeared turned up alive later, released months or years after they were hauled away and ordered to maintain a strict silence, the rights groups say. For 80, the families received only their dead bodies. Roughly 150 victims remain unaccounted-for.

The military did Hasina's dirty work as she brought it under her tight control. As if to make clear that she trusted no one, she put one of her relatives -- a retired army general -- in charge of coordinating military affairs. She allowed the top brass a free hand at making money to help ensure their loyalty.

Periodically, her intelligence outfits would present to her a list of threats to defuse, with the different forces competing to impress her, officials with knowledge of the program said. If she nodded, the system did its work.

Now, the military's role in the detentions is drawing questions. The Bangladeshi military has long found prestige in being a top contributor to United Nations peacekeeping missions abroad. After the country's institutions collapsed with Hasina's departure, the military pitched itself as the only institution with the credibility to hold Bangladesh together as it faces a difficult road ahead.

That image is harder to maintain with each new story that emerges from the House of Mirrors.

A Look Inside

Abdullahil Amaan Azmi applies a grim math to the ceaseless suffering he endured.

Azmi, a decorated former army general who was whisked away apparently because his father had been a senior Islamist leader, was freed from the military prison in August. He estimated that he had been blindfolded and handcuffed 41,000 times during his eight years in captivity.

"I did not see God's sky, the sun, the grass, the moon, the trees," Azmi said. In the beginning, he would try to catch a bit of sunlight through two small ventilation openings. "But once they found out through the CCTV camera," he said, "they closed those off."

The internment center was a tightly run operation intended to prolong a life barely worth living. Medical checkups were regular and thorough. Haircuts: every four to six months. Direct physical torture, if any, was kept to the early days, during interrogations.

The goal instead was to torture the mind.

Asked by the Times to sketch the facility, three of the former detainees drew practically identical blueprints: long corridors with half a dozen rooms facing away from each other. There were toilets at each end, a standing one and a squatting one. Each cell had a large exhaust fan meant to both drown out the guards' chatter and send the prisoners into madness.

"Let me show you," said Maroof Zaman, a former Bangladeshi ambassador to Qatar and Vietnam who spent 467 days in the prison before re-emerging in 2019. He opened Google Maps and zoomed in on a military garrison in Dhaka, pinpointing the part now marked as Aynaghor -- Bengali for House of Mirrors, a code name first revealed in 2022 by Netra News, a Bangladeshi news outlet operated in exile.

He and the other prisoners knew they were at a military base not just because of the discipline and precision of the guards, but also because they could hear morning parades. They knew that officers' residential quarters were close by, with normal life playing out just above them.

"Every Friday, you could hear the children singing," Zaman said.

During his interrogation, Zaman, who had been critical of Hasina, particularly over her accommodation of India, was hooded and punched repeatedly in the face, knocking out two teeth. His interrogators had printed all of his social media and blog posts, questioning him on specific paragraphs.

"We spent so much money printing your posts. Your father will give us all this money back?" one of the interrogators asked him.

Michael Chakma, a tribal rights activist, was set free in a jungle in August after being driven blindfolded for hours.

"It was the first time I saw daylight in five years," Chakma said. "As I was seeing this, I was trying to double-check if I was just imagining this light or if it was real."

He was abducted in 2019 as he entered a bank in Dhaka. He had been campaigning for self-governance for Bangladesh's Indigenous hill peoples.

Inside the prison, he kept asking his interrogators why he was there. The closest he could get to an answer was political retaliation: When Hasina had gone to the Chattogram Hill areas in the country's southeast to hold a rally for her party, the Awami League, the student wing of Chakma's party blocked the road.

Hasina finished her speech at the rally with a threat -- that she would see to those who had been behind the protest.

"That hurt her," Chakma said. "I always asked them, 'What is my crime? What have I done? What am I guilty of?' And they'd say that I have ill-intentioned politics in relation to the Awami League government."

Azmi, the former military officer, said that sometimes his large blindfold was so tight that it would squeeze his nose and make breathing difficult. He suffered eye pain, tooth decay and skin sores.

But all of that paled in comparison to the constant fear: that he could be taken out any night and his body dumped somewhere, with the next morning's newspapers fed a story that he had died in "crossfire" with the police.

Azmi prayed for dignity in death: "Please don't let cats and dogs eat my dead body, please have them send my body to my family, my loved ones."

"There is no language in which I can explain the humiliation and pain I felt," he said at a news conference.

Arman, the lawyer, was picked up in August 2016 as his wife and 4-year-old daughter watched, seemingly singled out for actions that were not even his own.

He was imprisoned shortly before his father, Mir Quasem Ali, was to be hanged over what the Hasina government labeled war crimes dating from 1971, when Ali was a teenage student leader of an Islamist party that opposed the creation of Bangladesh.

Ali was seen especially as a threat to Hasina because he sat atop a large and lucrative empire: a bank, a media network, hospitals.

"I am not proud of his role in '71," Arman said of his father. But as his lawyer, Arman said that his father had not deserved a day in jail, much less hanging.

After years of pain and uncertainty, Arman was finally able to reunite with his wife, daughters and mother while he recovered in a hospital. But he is haunted by the capriciousness with which his life was devastated: the summary execution of his father, crucial years stolen from family life, the abuse and isolation that shattered any sense of security -- all seemingly on a whim that will never be fully explained.

"It wasn't in my worst nightmares that they could take me away from my everything," he said, "in a moment where my father was going to be executed."

A Search for Justice

In the hours after Hasina's overthrow, a small group of men and women cut through the jubilant crowds flooding the streets and arrived at the gates of the country's military headquarters.

Some of the men were survivors of enforced disappearances. The women, the loved ones of those still missing, had been knocking on doors for years seeking proof of life, or at least closure.

They had been brought together by a time-sensitive truth: There might still be prisoners inside the House of Mirrors. If those at the gates did not look the commanding officers in the eye and speak to them now, the last of the disappeared might vanish forever.

Close to midnight, the officers finally let in three representatives for a meeting. At first, the officers repeated their textbook response: There was no such thing as an enforced disappearance. When the survivors told the officers that they knew at least two men held inside -- they had managed to see them during their daily bathroom runs -- there was little room for denial.

"They said, 'Give us 24 hours of time, we will sort it out,'" said Hasinur Rahman, a retired army lieutenant colonel who had been forcibly disappeared for over 18 months and had gone in as one of the representatives. "'If anyone is left, we will ensure they will be released as early as possible.'"

Over the next couple of days, Chakma, Arman and Azmi were all set free.

Their release filled the families of other victims with the kind of hope they had not felt in years. Over the following days, the mothers and sisters and daughters of the missing were everywhere.

They were at vigils for student protesters who had been killed by Hasina's forces. They were outside the Supreme Court, holding placards. One woman, Shirin Akhtar, finding a ring of military men guarding the court building, looked to officer after officer, holding the arm of each and pleading tearfully for help locating her son, Mohamad Sayed.

They were also outside the military headquarters in Dhaka and military bases in several other parts of the country, asking the same question: Where are our loved ones? Wherever they gathered, they would chant: "The House of Mirrors, the House of Mirrors." The response would be louder: "Shatter it! "Shatter it!"

One night, they arrived at the headquarters of the interim government that took over after Hasina's ouster, to present their plea to Muhammad Yunus, the 84-year-old Nobel laureate who is now the country's caretaker leader. One man, Babul Hawlader, his son's photo hanging from his neck, sat cross-legged in the middle of the road leading to the main gate.

Inside the headquarters, Sanjida Islam Tulee, whose brother Sajedul Islam Sumon disappeared in 2013, described the group's demand for justice. Their mother had become the core of a protest group called Mayer Daak, or "the mother's call," which stayed on the streets for years. Now the old woman sat quietly next to Yunus, hugging a framed portrait of her missing son.

"We are done waiting," her daughter said to Yunus. "What we want is something concrete."

He told the women that his government was a result of their protest: Their persistence for all those years had helped inspire the student protesters and others to rise up and topple Hasina.

If the country's interim leaders cannot pursue justice for them, Yunus said, "then this government has no meaning."

In the weeks that followed, Yunus signed an international treaty on enforced disappearances and formed a committee to investigate the crimes in Bangladesh. On Thursday, the country took an initial step in that process when a special court set up to investigate accusations of crimes against humanity announced it had issued an arrest warrant for Hasina, who is in exile abroad.

But in a sign of the difficult task ahead, and of how justice and reconciliation have been elusive throughout Bangladesh's history, Yunus was measured in his promise to the women in those early weeks.

"Keep your hopes up," Yunus told them, "but I can't say what the result will be."