When Bangladesh’s interim authorities established a commission to investigate enforced disappearances in August 2024, the mandate appeared sweeping. The body was created in the aftermath of the political upheaval that followed the fall of Sheikh Hasina’s government, amid mounting allegations that Bangladeshi security agencies had systematically abducted and secretly detained political opponents during the previous decade.
The cabinet circular tasked the five-member body with examining “all cases of enforced disappearances” carried out by intelligence and law-enforcement agencies since January 1, 2010, including the Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) and the Directorate General of Forces Intelligence (DGFI).
The commission was specifically instructed to determine who had been forcibly disappeared, establish their whereabouts and the circumstances of their detention, and provide recommendations to the government.
The scope of the mandate is defined by which agencies carried out the disappearances and when they occurred, not by the identity or citizenship of the victims.
Yet one case that appears to fall squarely within those parameters remains conspicuously absent from the commission’s work.
In November 2025, the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention (WGAD) concludedthat Rohingya community leader Dil Mohammed had been subjected to enforced disappearance after being seized in January 2023 and held at undisclosed locations for four months without access to family, lawyers, or judicial oversight.
The Working Group found that security agencies including RAB and DGFI were involved in his secret detention and coercive interrogation. It determined that his imprisonment lacked any legal basis and ordered his immediate release, compensation, and an independent investigation.
The timeline is significant
The commission’s mandate covers disappearances carried out by security agencies between January 1, 2010 and August 5, 2024, while the opinion of WGAD on the case of Dil Mohammed was published on November 21, 2025, before the commission’s mandate expired at the end of that year.
The Working Group concluded that Mohammed had been seized on 19 January 2023, held for four months at undisclosed locations, denied access to family and lawyers, and interrogated by agencies including the Rapid Action Battalion and the Directorate General of Forces Intelligence before eventually being produced in court with charges filed months later.
In other words, the alleged disappearance falls squarely within both the timeframe and institutional scope defined by the commission’s own mandate.
The juxtaposition raises uncomfortable questions
If a case that the United Nations has already characterized as an enforced disappearance -- carried out by the very agencies named in the commission’s mandate and occurring squarely within its timeframe -- is not being examined, the omission is difficult to explain on legal grounds.
The mandate speaks of “all cases” of disappearance by state agencies. It contains no exclusion for refugees, non-citizens, or Rohingya.
The silence surrounding Dil Mohammed’s case, and the similar allegations emerging from other Rohingya detainees connected to the same episode, suggests that the boundaries of the commission’s inquiry may ultimately be shaped less by the wording of its mandate than by political choices about which victims are acknowledged.
Legal expert Rezaur Rahman Lenin argues the commission’s mandate offers no legal basis for excluding Rohingya victims, as it required the investigation of all disappearances by state agencies regardless of nationality. He suggests the total absence of these cases reflects institutional inertia and practical barriers rather than legal restrictions. Families in remote camps lacked the means to access the process, and civil society failed to bridge that gap.
“If the mandate speaks of all enforced disappearances but an entire community’s cases never reach the process,” Lenin said, “that points less to a legal limitation than to a failure of institutions to make the mechanism accessible to those victims.”
Consequently, a process meant to address state abuse has effectively bypassed one of the country's most vulnerable populations.
When contacted about Rohingya cases, one of the five commissioners who sat on the Enforced Disappearance Commission, Dr Nabila Idris, confirmed that the commission had received some complaints involving Rohingya victims. However, she indicated that the number was extremely small. “I don’t have the exact number but in the single digits as far as I remember,” she said, adding that the commission believed it had not received the vast majority of such cases.
Yet the case of Dil Mohammed appears to complicate that explanation.
By November 2025, WGAD had already concluded that Mohammed had been subjected to enforced disappearance by Bangladeshi security agencies and had communicated that opinion to the authorities before its publication.
A copy of the UN decision was subsequently forwarded to the commission through the family. Despite this, a UN-validated finding does not appear in the commission’s final report or among the disappearance cases selected for detailed analysis.
Evidence suggests that the omission was not simply the result of Rohingya victims failing to reach the commission.
In January 2025, Md Youha, a son of Dil Mohammed, says he met with Commissioner Nur Khan Liton to discuss his father’s disappearance. According to Youha, Liton told him not to contact him again about the matter.
Months later, after WGAD concluded that Mohammed had been subjected to enforced disappearance, his international counsel, Haydee Dijkstal of 33 Bedford Row Chambers in London, was informed of the decision. Under United Nations procedures, the Bangladeshi authorities would also have been notified before the opinion was made public on November 21,2025.
Shortly afterwards, Youha says he again met Liton and raised the UN decision with him. Following that encounter, a copy of the Working Group’s opinion was forwarded to Liton’s assistant, identified as Saiful.
In a message dated November 22, Saiful replied: “We will focus on the report. If any further interview [is] needed, I will let you know.”
No such interview took place. According to Dijkstal, neither she nor the family has received any subsequent communication from the commission as of March 2026.
One fragment of a much larger story
According to information provided by families and legal intermediaries, 51 individuals have been accused in connection with the “Zero Point” incident -- a reference to the Rohingya encampment that had developed in the narrow strip of land between Bangladesh and Myanmar near the border at Tumbru, often described as “no man’s land.”
The settlement, home to several thousand Rohingya refugees who had fled violence in Rakhine State, was destroyed in January 2023 during an attack that displaced the community. In the months that followed, 18 men were arrested at different times and locations in connection with the incident.
Those currently detained have been scattered across a network of prisons in Bangladesh, often in small groups of two or three. Families say the dispersion has made it difficult for detainees to maintain contact with one another or coordinate their legal defense.
Several detainees allege that their time in official custody was preceded by months of secret detention in “Ayna Ghars.” According to their accounts, some men were held there for periods ranging from two to ten months, during which their whereabouts were concealed from their families.
They describe being confined in dark, isolated rooms, often blindfolded when guards entered and escorted them to the toilet.
Interrogators allegedly kept their faces covered and conducted repeated sessions aimed at extracting confessions linking them to militant activity.
Detainees report being beaten, suspended while blindfolded, and pressured to sign or record statements implicating themselves in the incident.
Their descriptions echo previous testimonies about Ayna Ghar, a clandestine facility Human Rights Watch and media investigations have linked to enforced disappearance cases.
The testimonies contain details that recur across multiple accounts.
Some detainees say they were forced to recite the Kalema as if preparing for death, while others describe interrogators threatening them with indefinite disappearance if they refused to cooperate.
Several claim that during Ramadan in 2023 the intensity of the abuse increased, with generators deliberately run during the call to prayer so that detainees could not hear the Azaan or mark the passing of time.
Throughout this period, families say they received no information about the men’s whereabouts. Only later were detainees transferred into the formal prison system, in some cases first appearing before courts months after their initial arrest.
Conditions in prison have remained restrictive. Families report that several detainees have been held in condemned cells or high-security units, where they remain locked inside for most or all of the day.
Communication with relatives has been tightly controlled; some prisoners are now permitted one supervised phone call per week, while others experienced extended periods with no contact at all.
In several instances, detainees who obtained High Court bail orders were reportedly not released, with prison authorities allegedly waiting for clearance from intelligence agencies before acting on the court’s instructions.
These accounts have not yet been independently investigated, and the names of the individuals involved are being withheld for security reasons.
But if substantiated, they would point to a pattern that closely mirrors the findings of the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention in the case of Dil Mohammed: Secret detention, prolonged incommunicado confinement, coercive interrogation, and delayed judicial process.
Taken together, the allegations suggest that the disappearance documented in that case may not have been an isolated episode but part of a broader system affecting multiple Rohingya detainees connected to the same incident.
The implications clearly extend beyond a single case. International human rights lawyer Megan Hirst, who represents Rohingya victims before the International Criminal Court, noted that when disappearances involving a particular ethnic group are not pursued despite falling within an investigative mandate, it can raise “a serious concern that there is racial or ethnic discrimination at play.”
Bangladesh has repeatedly pledged to restore the rule of law and address past abuses following the political transition of 2024. At the same time, the country remains under close international scrutiny over its treatment of Rohingya refugees and its handling of security-force abuses.
The decision of the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention in the case of Dil Mohammed presented the authorities with a concrete opportunity to demonstrate that commitment.
The absence of any visible engagement with the ruling -- either by the disappearance commission or by the government itself -- risks reinforcing the perception that accountability mechanisms continue to operate unevenly, and especially when Rohingya victims are involved.
Shafiur Rahman is a journalist and documentary maker. He writes the Rohingya Refugee News (RRN) newsletter.