It said Tahmid Hasib Khan, a 22-year-old Canadian permanent resident and undergraduate at the University of Toronto, has been held in Bangladesh since he was among the hostages who survived an attack in which 22 people were killed at a café in Dhaka early this month.
In an interview with the Star on Monday, Tahmid’s older brother Talha said no one in his family has had any contact with Tahmid since last week, when his mother was allowed to send him homemade food for Eid ul-Fitr. Talha said an official told their father a few days ago that Tahmid was transferred from police custody and is still being detained by another government agency.
“Beyond that the family knows nothing, and as the days pile on, anxiety is taking a toll; Talha said his father has been hospitalized with chest pain, while his mother and cousins in Dhaka work to find out where Tahmid, who has epilepsy, is being held. The family has also written to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to intervene in the case.”
“It’s impossible to track him. We do not have a clue what is happening to him. We do not have a clue about the conditions of his confinement,” said Marlys Edwardh, a Toronto lawyer hired by Tahmid’s family. She added that Bangladesh is well known for its brutal interrogation tactics, according to the report.
“The most you can do is to take a look at the human rights record of Bangladesh. They raise profound concern,” Edwardh said. “This is now incommunicado detention.”
Chantal Gagnon, press secretary for Global Affairs Minister Stéphane Dion, said in an email that “there are limits” to what the government can do for non-citizens overseas, but that the ministry is closely monitoring the situation.
The report said Tahmid flew from Canada to Dhaka on July 1 to visit his parents. “He then planned to travel to Nepal to work for the summer at an internship with UNICEF, his brother said. That night he was at the Holey Artisan Bakery when assailants stormed the café and held dozens of people hostage for more than 10 hours. Bangladeshi security forces moved in on the assailants early the next morning, killed five gunmen and released 13 hostages. Tahmid was detained after speaking with his elated family by phone that day, Talha said.”
They haven’t seen him since.
The report adds: There were several calls on Ottawa to help Tahmid in recent days, including the family’s letter to Trudeau, as friends from the Bangladeshi Students’ Association at U of T spoke out to vouch for his character. Both Tahmid’s brother and the president of U of T wrote letters to Dion, while Human Rights Watch expressed concern over his continued detention in Dhaka.
Gar Pardy, who served as the head of Canada’s consular services from 1992 to 2003, said consular officials often reach out to authorities in other countries when someone is being detained, even when that person is not a Canadian citizen. “There’s nothing very complex about doing this. We do it all the time,” Pardy said.
Tahmid’s brother said the family still has no idea why he’s been detained so long. According to widespread reports in Bangladeshi and foreign media, a British engineer who was held hostage at the Holey Artisan Bakery is also still in detention.
A report in the New York Times quoted other hostages saying Tahmid was beaten by security forces when they raided the café and ended the hostage crisis. The report said Tahmid and his friends were spared by the attackers because they were Bangladeshi Muslims, and that Tahmid and the British engineer, Hasnat Karim, were forced to carry out tasks during the siege. For Tahmid, this included having to carry a gun and go with the assailants to the roof of the restaurant, the newspaper reported.
According to the article, Tahmid also persuaded the attackers to spare the group of Muslims as the increasingly anxious gunmen discussed what to do with them in the waning hours of the siege.
Tahmid’s brother said he had read the report but could not confirm what happened to him that night. “We’ve been hearing so many things from so many sources,” Talha said.
Amarnath Amarsingam, a Dalhousie University professor who studies extremism, said he believes images of Tahmid on the roof of the restaurant with assailants, combined with the possibility of his fingerprints on a gun, may explain why Dhaka authorities have him in continued detention. He added that it’s possible that his Canadian connection is involved, given that the head of the Bangladeshi faction of Daesh, also known as ISIS or ISIL, is believed to be a Canadian-Bangladeshi man from Windsor named Tamim Chowdhury.
Pardy, meanwhile, said Tahmid’s family had good reason to be concerned for his well-being, citing incidents of torture and abuse that have been reported in Bangladesh. In 2011, for example, Human Rights Watch published a report on extrajudicial killings and torture by an elite crime-fighting unit that it blamed for hundreds of deaths.
“There are pretty established practices nobody should be emulating in terms of what happens to people in the dark holes of jails and prisons in that part of the world,” Pardy said.
“The family should have every fear that something maybe untoward has happened here.”
Source: Prothom Alo
