The three main Bangladeshi intelligence agencies – the Special Branch, the Directorate General of Forces Intelligence and the National Security Intelligence – had no clue that the initial conspiracy by the students’ community began in 2015, from a rented house near Dhaka University, Northeast News has reliably learnt.
Over six months after a well-organised and coordinated students’ movement brought down the Sheikh Hasina regime following a month-long violent and bloody agitation, a top Bangladesh police official laid bare to Northeast News the deep conspiracy between the students’ coordinators, university teachers and a “US surrogate intelligence agency” in Dhaka and abroad.
The senior police official, who, by virtue of his sensitive position in Dhaka, received/consumed most intelligence, admitted that “our failure was complete.”
However, he added that the situation in August 2024 could have been “salvaged” had the DGFI shared information about the students’ conspiracy that was hatched with “US officials” in Dhaka and abroad.
The officer revealed in the strictest confidence that it was not the Dhaka Police’s Detective Branch which had “really” interrogated the five key students’ coordinators.
“It was the DGFI which questioned them and used third-degree measures against some of the students’ coordinators. The Detective Branch led by its chief Harun-ur-Rashid, who took in the students’ coordinators for a meal, acted only as part of a cover story. The real interrogation was done by the DGFI,” the senior officer said.
What is, however, surprising and “unbelievable” is that the DGFI, despite possessing the full extent of the conspiracy, including the involvement of US officials, both in Dhaka and abroad, suppressed it from Sheikh Hasina and the Special Branch and NSI.
By the time, the Bangladeshi security establishment could “process” the “approaching threat”, the “students had constituted themselves in an unstoppable force”, the officer said.
He revealed that even Indian security agencies, which otherwise have an active interest in Bangladesh, had little or no clue about the frequent clandestine meetings that the students’ coordinators had with their US handlers as well as a section of university teachers.
“The only input that was shared with us by the Indians was that “there could be a mid-term election in September 2024. We had begun preparing accordingly.
There was not a shred of information on the impending agitation that was followed by Sheikh Hasina’s ouster.
Acknowledging that the Bangladeshi security agencies “did not even know that (Hizbut Tehrir activist) Mahfuz Alam “existed”, the officer said that interim government head Mohammad Yunus’ Press secretary Shafiqul Alam, a former journalist with AFP news agency, was in constant touch with the main students’ coordinators “since at least July 15, 2024”.
Alam, the senior officer disclosed long after the police had pieced together all the information related to the conspiracy, had met Mahfuz Alam as early as July 2024.
