Shahidul Alam: Eyewitness to an abduction

Dhaka. Sunday 5th of August. A little after 10:00 pm. I was staying the night at my mother's apartment at Road no. 9A in the residential area of Dhanmondi. She was at the dining table having her dinner. I was in the drawing room next to it, heading for the room at the back. Suddenly a man's scream – more a bellow, actually, of shock and fright! – tore through the night-time silence. Startled, I froze in my tracks. I had never heard anything close to it in the apartment complex. I turned to look at my mother, but she, elderly and hard of hearing, was carrying on with her meal undisturbed. I stood still in the dark, ears cocked. A madman's howl of despair on the street? But no, it had come not from the ground level but somewhere closer to this fifth-floor flat. A ruckus in a neighbouring apartment? Very unlikely. I went to the window that had a direct view of the second building in the complex, of the fourth-floor apartment in which lived Rahnuma Ahmed, my sister and her partner Shahidul Alam.

I saw, with a stab of surprise, two to three men on each flight of stairs from the fourth floor all the way down to the ground floor. Silhouettes in the sparse gloom going down fast. I looked at their flat. I could see into the small hallway of the entrance and a narrow slice of the sitting room. No sign of Rahnuma or Shahidul. Then I noticed that the front door was wide open. Not ajar, but gaping wide open. Just then two men came into view, walking swiftly from inside the apartment into the hallway and out of the door. In that glimpse under the lights, I registered their build, gait and short hair. Cops! They had that distinct look. But not ordinary ones. These were special plainclothes cops. Or worse, the feared paramilitary outfit. Alarmed, I noted that the other men on the stairs had that same look. One held, I saw now, a walkie-talkie in his hand.