For eight years, Mir Ahmad bin Quasem was imprisoned in complete darkness and isolation, bitten endlessly by mosquitoes and with cockroaches and rats scouring his body. “There was nothing I could do,” he recalls of his ordeal, except “preparing myself every night for the executioners to come and take me out.”
Quasem was locked up in 2016 while serving on the legal team of his father, a leader of the Islamist Jamaat-e-Islami party targeted by the regime of then ruler Sheikh Hasina. He was among the hundreds held in the dreaded “House of Mirrors” prison, where blindfolded detainees were kept in solitary confinement.
Then, at dawn on August 6 last year, he was dragged out into the light. “I thought I was going to be executed, so I recited my last prayers,” he says. Instead, he was dumped in an empty field, a free man.