Dhaka: Police today arrested the editor of Amar Desh, the mouthpiece of main opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) and its ally Jamaat-e-Islami, after he was accused of sedition and inciting religious tension in the country.
Witnesses said policemen arrested Mahmudur Rahman after raiding the newspaper office at Karwan Bazar area while police said he was taken to Detective Branch office for initial interrogation.
“He has been arrested on the basis of evidence obtained after investigations on various charges including cyber crimes” intervening in privacy of a judge, a police spokesman told newsmen after the arrest.
He said Rahman was expected to be arrested several weeks ago but police took time to gather the evidence on the allegations while he was expected to be tried in speedy trial tribunal.
Rahman’s arrest amid growing demands by non-partisan youngsters, waging a campaign for toughest punishment for 1971 war criminals under the banner of Ganajagaran Mancha, for carrying out a misleading propaganda calling them “atheists”.
The ruling Awami league leaders accused the daily of inciting violence during recent political unrest prompting the government to launch a virtual crackdown on BNP ad arrest nearly a dozen of its top leaders including the party’s acting secretary general Mirza Fakhrul Islam Alamgir.
“Mahmudur Rahman has hurt the Muslims religious sentiment, which is totally unacceptable . . . he has been arrested to establish the rule of law,” state minister for home Shamsul Haque Tuku said.
But Rahman angered the secular Ganajagaran Mancha for carrying out a protracted campaign to portray them as anti-Islamic while he continued to stay at the newspaper office to evade arrest since December last year when he was sued for sneaking into and publishing a Skype conversation between a judge and an expatriate Bangladeshi-born jurist.
“He published fabricated comments on Prophet Mohammad to portray us anti-Islamic and insight a religious tension . . . he himself has defamed the Islam and hurt our religious sentiment,” Mancha’s spokesman Imran H Sarkar said in an reaction to media.
But several Islamist groups staged a street protest against his arrest calling him a “courageous and true soldier of Islam” and “while pro-opposition journalist leader Shawkat Mahmoud called the arrest an “uncivilised task on the part of a savage government”.
“He has often engineered controversies, treading the fine line between journalism and partisan activism rather clumsily,” read a comment by an online newspaper after his arrest.
