Before her arrest, Meghna posted multiple Facebook updates alleging that a foreign diplomat was trying to silence her with the help of law enforcement agencies. The model said the diplomat had an affair with her.

During a live Facebook video soon after her post, individuals claiming to be police were knocking on her door. They reportedly entered her house, and she was subsequently taken into custody and sent to jail for 30 days under a 50-year-old relic of a law that has no place in a democratic country.

In the 12-minute livestream, Alam was seen repeatedly pleading with law enforcers and assuring them that she would cooperate.

What was baffling was that her arrest was not even acknowledged by the authorities for 24 hours, the silence broken only by mounting pressure on social media. The Dhaka Metropolitan Police (DMP) eventually issued a press statement stating that she had been arrested for attempting to “worsen international relations by spreading falsehoods about important individuals and conspiring to harm the country economically”.

Even if the accused were embroiled in the said “conspiracy”, the manner in which she was picked up and how the authorities remained quiet about her detention, evokes a traumatic flashback to the Awami League regime’s era of fearmongering and suppression. The concerns are further amplified when it becomes public discourse whether a Bangladeshi citizen was arrested to “appease” a someone, regardless of how powerful they are — How can the people trust a government if it cannot be transparent about a citizen’s arrest? She had gone further to say that she would be arrested on the diplomat’s word.

Wouldn’t the best course of action have been to publicly issue a warrant, acknowledge it, and then grant the detainee her legal rights of rebuttal as a citizen of Bangladesh?

The unease surrounding Meghna Alam’s detention is further amplified by Bangladesh’s troubling history of enforced disappearances. For years, human rights organisations have documented numerous cases where critics of the government or opposition politicians, have been picked up by plainclothesmen, only to vanish without a trace. The commission on enforced disappearance is looking into hundreds of such allegations from the Awami regime. It was measures like these that necessitated the overarching reforms following the July uprising of 2024. The invocation of a vaguely worded law like the Special Powers Act inevitably stirs anxieties that Meghna could very well end up like many others.

Whether Meghna Alam will be found guilty of crimes must be determined through due legal proceedings, which the police have promised to follow. However, transparency must be key in all such cases moving forward to re-establish the trust between citizens and law enforcement agencies, which had been significantly hindered for the past 15 years.

Sadi Mohammad Shahnewaz