26 July 2024: Block raids, key coordinators’ detention, and internet shutdown

Illustration: TBS

On the night of 26 July, a phone call came to me. The voice on the other end quivered, "Hey, two police cars are blocking the alley! I think they're doing a block raid. What should I do?"

The caller was my friend who was an active protester. By then, that kind of call was a routine. It was a nightly occurrence across Dhaka, and the government was out for blood. They were rounding up young students who joined the protests, detained three of the key coordinators from hospital and an Awami League minister claimed the most ludicrous statement amidst the internet shutdown - 'The internet has been shut down by itself.' People were furious, and the pressure was building up. 

Block raids come for the students

The pattern repeated itself, street after street, for days. Convoys of law enforcement vehicles, sometimes by daylight, more often after dark, rolled into a residential block and sealed it off within minutes. Officers took position at every exit. Within an hour or two, the block's electricity connection was cut, and its streetlights went dark. Reinforcements arrived soon after.

Then came the door-to-door searches. Phones were checked room by room. Residents were made to stand and sit repeatedly, on command, as a form of humiliation and control. Anyone whose phone held a protest photo, a video, or even a screenshot of the unrest was taken. Where the person on the list couldn't be found, a family member was taken instead. Local Awami League cadres and leaders were taking the police and RAB to the houses of the protesters. Many were stripped and checked for injuries. If found, taken to the police station. 

In Shaheenbagh, in the pre-dawn hours of 26 July, residents watched helicopters drop low over their rooftops, sweeping the street below with searchlights. In Bashundhara, residents reported the same. Police had told people the previous afternoon not to be outside after 5pm; by nightfall, the streets belonged entirely to the security forces. In Mahakhali, the block raid arrived with the power cut first and then, entire families fled their homes in the dark rather than wait to find out why.

In my locality, a resident was filming a raid from an upper floor. A member of the law enforcement team spotted the phone and fired directly at the window to scare him off.

Within days, police had filed 555 cases nationwide over the unrest, and the arrest count had crossed 6,000. Thirty more students were arrested in Chattogram alone that day. In Dhaka City, the tally since 25 July had already reached 3,007 arrests—87% of them, by later count, with no political affiliation whatsoever. Nobody could say how many of those arrests had come through a block raid, because no one was keeping that number.

Taken from hospital beds

At half past three that Friday afternoon, a group of men in plain clothes walked into Gonoshasthaya Nagar Hospital in Dhanmondi. They identified themselves as law enforcement. Within minutes, they had taken all three coordinators of the Students Against Discrimination movement out of their hospital rooms—Nahid Islam from room 703, Asif Mahmud from room 311, and Abu Baker Majumder, who had been staying with Asif.

It was not the first time. Nahid had been picked up from Nandipara in Khilgaon at midnight on 19 July and dumped in Purbachal at dawn two days later, his body marked with injuries from whatever had happened in between. Asif and Baker had been taken the same night, 19 July, and left—Asif in Hatirjheel and Baker in Dhanmondi—on 24 July. Both had been admitted to Gonoshasthaya since.

Fatima Tasnim, a relative who had been in the room, described what happened next. Word came that the boy who delivered food to the ward had been detained; she went to check on Asif's room and found four men shouting at him and Baker. When she and the nurses on duty objected that the patients hadn't been discharged, one of the men turned on the nurse in charge: "Do you know who we are? Do you know what counter-terrorism means?" 

They took Asif and Baker's phones along with the men themselves. Nahid, she then learned, had already been taken from his own room.

Asif's condition wasn't fit for discharge at all. There were no visible injuries, but something had clearly been injected into him. He didn't want to leave, and the doctors didn't want to release him. But under the law enforcement's pressure, they were forced to sign him out against medical advice. Nahid, hospital sources said, was discharged on the same self-risk terms. 

That night, Dhaka Metropolitan Police's additional commissioner, Harun Or Rashid, confirmed the three coordinators were in DB custody. "For their own safety, we have taken the coordinators into DB custody," he said, adding that they would be asked whether they had any information about the violence.

'The government did not shut down the internet, it went down'

That same Friday, at a tree-planting programme in the capital marking the 53rd birthday of the prime minister's ICT adviser, Sajeeb Wazed Joy, the post and telecommunications minister, Zunaid Ahmed Palok, explained the internet blackout that had gripped the country since 18 July. I happened to watch it live on television from our newsroom. 

The government, he said, had not shut down the internet; the internet had simply gone down. Roughly 70% of the country's internet service provider servers ran through three data centres in Mahakhali, hosting 18 of the country's 34 international gateways, he explained. Two days into the blackout, he said, officials had discovered that submarine cable lines near Kanchpur on the Dhaka-Chattogram route had been burned. Broadband had been restored on 23 July; mobile data was still down, with 4G promised back by the weekend pending talks with operators.

Palok also claimed that intelligence had traced between 50,000 and 100,000 new SIM cards entering Dhaka over the three days of worst violence, from areas he described as historic strongholds of BNP, Jamaat, Shibir and Chhatra Dal activity—Uttara, Rampura, Mohammadpur, Jatrabari, Narayanganj and Gazipur among them.

The claim 'The government did not shut down the internet, the internet went down' would go on to become one of the most widely mocked sentences of the entire uprising.

At a separate press conference the same day, Awami League general secretary Obaidul Quader broke six days of public silence to lay the blame for civilian deaths squarely on BNP-Jamaat, insisting neither police nor ordinary citizens could be responsible for such killings. He spoke, without irony, of children shot while looking out of windows, calling the violence the work of Jamaat-Shibir's rampage.

A call for national unity

BNP secretary general Mirza Fakhrul Islam Alamgir issued a press release that Friday calling for what he termed jatiyo oikya or national unity around a single, minimum demand. He demanded the fall of the 'illegitimate, fascist, killer Hasina government'. The call went out to every democratic political party, social and cultural organisation, and, notably, to Jamaat-e-Islami and other Islamist parties allied or otherwise. 

By the time 26 July ended, the state's message to the country had arrived through three separate channels at once, and all of them pointed to the fact that the government was not backing down. In fact, it was doubling down on the repression. So, the people prepared themselves for the upcoming days. The repression only galvanised their resolve.