Law enforcers take Mahmudur Rahman, acting editor of Bangla daily Amar Desh, to a court in the capital on Thursday.
Mahmudur Rahman, acting editor of Bangla daily Amar Desh, was placed on a 13-day remand hours after police arrested him at his office in the capital.
The arrest came almost four months after Rahman was sued, in line with a High Court directive, for publishing reports on Skype conversation between former International Crimes Tribunal chairman Justice Md Nizamul Huq and an expatriate Bangladeshi legal expert, Ahmed Ziauddin, last year.
A team from Detective Branch of police picked him up around 9:00am at the newspaper office where Rahman had been staying since filing of the case.
He was kept at the DB headquarters on Minto Road before being produced before the court.
The arrest triggered mixed reaction with a group of journalists demanding his release, terming it as an attack on press freedom, while other groups hailing it.
Many groups including the Shahbagh Gonojagoron Mancha demanded that law enforcers arrested Rahman for inciting religious fanaticism by reprinting blogs and social media posts defaming Islam and blaming Shahbagh activists for writing those.
REMAND
Detectives took Mahmudur Rahman to the Court of Chief Metropolitan Magistrate, Dhaka around 2:45pm with a prayer for placing him on 30-day remand in three cases.
The arrestee did not appoint a lawyer to defend him and refrained from seeking bail.
He opposed the remand prayer.
After hearing the arguments, Additional Chief Metropolitan Magistrate Shahidul Islam placed Rahman on a seven-day remand in a case filed for publishing reports on Skype conversation which was filed with Tejgaon Police Station.
The court granted a six-day remand in two other cases filed with the same police station for hartal and pre-hartal violence in February and March and obstructing police from discharging their duties. Rahman was shown arrested in the two cases.
Court sources said Mahmudur is likely to be implicated with five other cases relating to hartal violence on February 28.
Of the cases, one was filed with Ramna Police Station while the remaining four with Shahbagh Police Station.
BACKGROUND
Mahmudur, also former energy adviser of the BNP-Jamaat-led alliance government, started to stay at his office to evade arrest since he was sued along with Amar Desh Publisher Hasmat Ali on December 13 for publishing the Skype conversation between Justice Huq and Ahmed Ziauddin.
The complaint also charged Mahmudur for hindering and stopping the activities of the International Crimes Tribunals which have been dealing with cases filed for wartime offences.
The charges also include sedition, hatching conspiracy and hacking computer system, said Masudur Rahman, deputy commissioner of DMP.
Regarding the Skype scam, the newspaper said it had collected the records of the conversation from a source abroad. In the “transcript” of the conversation published by the newspaper, Justice Huq was judgemental of a number of legal experts of the country and people involved in the crimes against humanity cases, according to Amar Desh.
On December 6, two days before the paper began publishing the “transcript”, the three-member Tribunal-1 led by Justice Huq in an order said Justice Huq’s email and Skype accounts along with his computer had been hacked. Following the Skype scandal, Judge Huq resigned on December 11.
Besides questioning the neutrality of the tribunals, the newspapers published a series of reports criticising the Shahbagh movement, which began on February 5 to demand capital punishment to war criminals.
To defame the movement, the newspaper reproduced derogatory contents about Islam and Prophet Muhammad (pbuh), which different groups seemingly linked to the war crimes accused blamed the Shahbagh organisers for.
Source: The Daily Star