Two-and-a-half months after his body was found in a Dhaka hotel room, it is now emerging that US Special Forces (Airborne) officer Terrence Arvelle Jackson travelled to at least three Bangladesh defence establishments, including the Chittagong naval base, across three districts in the four months since his arrival in that country.
In a report on September 7, Northeast News had revealed, based on detailed discussions with Dhaka Metropolitan Police sources, that 50-year-old Jackson travelled to “different locations in the country for work related to his country’s government”.
Jackson was a US Special Forces (Airborne) officer who had taken early retirement from service to be part of an American private security company. His in-service parent military unit was most likely the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (Airborne), nicknamed the ‘Night Stalkers’.
Jackson’s room booking at The Westin Hotel was done via email by the Dhaka-based US embassy. The day his body was found in room number 808 on August 31, three US diplomats who reached the hotel after being informed of Jackson’s death, did not allow a post-mortem examination and hurriedly dispatched the corpse to the US. Born in Ohio on May 27, 1975, Jackson, in all likelihood, lived with his family in Arizona.
After first entering Bangladesh in April 2025, Jackson took up rooms at Dhaka’s The Westin Hotel. While there is some indication of his footfalls in India’s northeast, Jackson visited Rajshahi, Sylhet and the Chittagong naval base, where BNS Issa Khan is home to the Bangladesh Navy’s fleet of ships and submarines. The area around BNS Issa Khan includes other facilities such as the naval dockyard, the Bangladesh Naval Academy and small bases such as BNS Ulka and BNS Bhatiary.
There is no indication about Jackson’s specific interest in Rajshahi and Sylhet, where the Bangladesh Infantry Regimental Centre and the 17th Infantry Division are located, respectively. The Jalalabad Cantonment in Sylhet is home to the country’s Para Commando Brigade.
There is some evidence to indicate that Jackson conducted training sessions for Bangladesh Army officers even as Dhaka-based security officials suspect that his visit to Rajshahi may have been undertaken to meet Richard Daniel Roman, an American security contractor employed by Makwa Global Solutions. Roman, documents show, took up rooms at Grand Riverview Hotel, which is right opposite the Rajshahi Metropolitan Police headquarters.
While Bangladeshi security agencies are still trying to ascertain the dates on which Jackson travelled to Rajshahi, Sylhet and the Chittagong naval facilities and the people he might have met at these places, there is some confirmation that Roman left Rajshahi on September 5, five days after the former’s body was found in The Westin room. He took a US-Bangla flight out of Rajshahi to Dhaka before leaving the country the same evening.
