The case for the defence: Hasnat and Tahmid

The arrests of July 1 terrorist attack survivors Hasnat Reza Karim and Tahmid Hasib Khan under Section 54 of the CrPC tells you something. It tells you that more than a month after the incident, despite having both men in their custody, the police still have not found anything to substantiate a criminal link between the two and the Gulshan terror attack. Under Section 54, police can arrest anyone without necessarily linking them to a specific case or crime. The arrests allow us the scope, finally, to now argue that the entire premise upon which Karim and Tahmid have drawn suspicion, from both the public and the police, right from the start, has been seriously flawed. The principal basis for this suspicion that has fired up far more imaginations than is advisable for a nation’s collective sanity, is some of the video footage shot by the Korean gentleman next door, in which Hasnat in particular, seems to be getting along quite nicely with some of the attackers. His demeanour in the passage during which he goes up to the balcony in the company of the attackers has been variously interpreted to signify anything from irrefutable bonds of kinship to outright leadership of the group. And for an alarmingly large cross-section of people, that is enough. Admittedly, for us Bangladeshis, what happened on July 1 was in many ways unprecedented. Yet in trying to make sense of what happened that night at Holey, we will do well not to elevate it to some unique event in the annals of mankind. By now, history is replete with such horrific incidents. And our best accomplice in deconstructing the events at Holey that night, next to eyewitness accounts, would be what all its diabolical forerunners have taught us about how such incidents unfold. For the purpose of this article though, we shall restrict ourselves to matters pertinent to Hasnat and Tahmid’s predicament. First and foremost, taking visual evidence of a sense of comfort between hostage-taker and victim to implicate the latter in a crime that is manifestly perpetrated by the former, requires extremely shallow reasoning. The most misleading aspect of this line of thinking is how it feeds off our preconceived notions of how hostages behave. Indeed, it deigns to even impose some of these notions on us, all the better to push its own chosen narrative. In a nation still on the mend from the trauma of that night, the perpetrators of the most heinous act witnessed in independent Bangladesh are rightly vilified in the public imagination. They have taken the place of the ultimate ‘other’. And that is understandable. Where we start getting in over our heads though, is when we allow this prejudice to weigh on our judgement of anything and anyone associated with Nibras, Rohan and company. Heaven forbid appear agreeable to them! We’d be well advised to guard against this tendency. Sitting in the comfort of home, clicking through Youtube videos with extremely suggestive titles like Feshe jacche Hasnat Karim and Hasnat Karim e khalnayak, we should really know better than to hold the hostages’ actions during those 11 hours to that standard. The thing to understand is this: the history of hostage crises tells us it is not at all uncommon, once any killings are out of the way, for hostage-takers and their victims to develop some sort of bond. The intensity will vary and it may all be predicated on feelings that are less than genuine or entirely specific to the situation. But this crops up in a wide range of hostage situations perpetrated across the world by all sorts of outlaws, from the infamous FARC rebels of Colombia to small-time robbers in the US to the so-called Jihadists of the Muslim world. Stockholm Syndrome is a concept in psychology that seeks to explain just one form this bond may take. Also known as Survival Identification Syndrome, the Gale Encyclopaedia of Medicine defines it as “a form of bonding between a captive and captor in which the captive begins to identify with, and may even sympathize with, the captor.” David Alexander and Susan Klein, in a 2009 paper published in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, regard it as “a means of coping and surviving since it certainly enables, on many occasions, hostages to deal with extreme and life-threatening circumstances.” That isn’t to suggest that either Hasnat or Tahmid were afflicted with Stockholm Syndrome that night. We aren’t here to play armchair psychiatrist. But it should serve to reinforce the full range of reactions that could possibly be in play, so to speak. Above all, there is no good reason for us to expect the behaviour, or worse, the demeanour of people taken hostage to conform to our simplistic notions of what is normal. And even less for us to view it as suspicious when they don’t. Let’s be clear, even in the video footage that has given rise to this whole disingenuous angle, there is actually nothing that either Hasnat or Tahmid are seen doing that can be said to be incriminating. Being friendly, or cordial with people, even terrorists, is well within the rules. Contrary to the appalling lies printed in some respected vernacular newspapers, at no point is Hasnat Karim seen carrying a gun. At least not in any of the footage shot by DK Hwang, the Korean neighbour. It’s just one of the Endless Little Lies that have been peddled to serve the cause of the One Big Lie. Apart from being an affront to the truth, it shames the industry that spawned it. Now for the apparently incriminating photos that came out on Sunday in which Tahmid does appear with a gun: the boy was foolish to take up the gun, even if he was coerced into it, as was reported in at least two American outlets before the latest photos came out. One could argue that that kind of naivety itself shows he wasn’t part of the attack crew, which is what is being proposed here of course. The accounts in the New York Times and Guernica that came out before these latest photos surfaced sound plausible enough. At one point, Hasnat does walk in front of the attackers, getting back inside from the balcony, but stop for a second to consider the flimsiness of the entire argument: walking in front of the terrorists is a sign that he is leading them? Appearing too friendly with the terrorists? The bald evil mastermind confers on the roof as he consider his next move? Close your eyes to the fact that he is out in the open, like he has no idea what’s coming for him, and he appears a cross between Bin Laden and Moriarty. Kind of half-plausible. Then he turns around and tells his men, the ones with the guns: “You boys stay back to face the music, I’m walking out with the loot.” That simply doesn’t happen. There is no comparable precedent in the history of so-called Jihadist violence. I asked former IGP Nurul Huda. You could also do a smart Google search. That would also show you that some people keeping their wits about them even in extreme situations does happen. It’s unnecessary to make a hero out of Hasnat Karim. But the man had a wife and kids, not to mention himself, to save and he managed it. He cannot be judged on the basis of whatever methods he may have employed to this end. Same with Tahmid, who was there with his two friends. (I’m not even going to get into who takes family and friends into staging terrorist attacks, because it doesn’t seem to cut much ice with people hell-bent on giving in to groupthink.) Undoubtedly, they were helped by the fact that the killing spree was over. But still, any wrong move could have disturbed the equilibrium. It so happens that the US government provides tips to its citizens on how to survive hostage situations. The following is excerpted from DEPARTMENT OF STATE PUBLICATION 10217: Security Awareness Overseas, An Overview: “If taken hostage, your best defence is passive cooperation. You may be terrified but …  behaving rationally increases your chances for survival.” Then under ‘Behaviour Suggestions’, the very first point: “Try to establish some kind of rapport with your captors.” Then further down: “Build relations with fellow captives and with the terrorists.” (The emphasis is always mine.) Again, this isn’t to suggest that Hasnat or Tahmid read this manual. More to the point is that a government manual would only offer advice it considered doable for normal, average human beings. Not superheroes. Then they would advise you to try and overpower your captors, as some are suggesting Hasnat and Tahmid should have done on the balcony. By the time the sun rose on July 2, the situation inside the restaurant had sufficiently calmed down for some of the staff who were suffocating in a bathroom to simply make a run for their lives, not caring about putting themselves in the line of gunfire. By the way not one of them, nor indeed the Indian doctor, nor two Sri Lankan nationals, nor anyone else out of the 32 hostages who made it out alive, have said anything to implicate anyone inside the restaurant to be in cahoots with the terrorists. Nor, presumably, have they said this to the police, who then would have no need to make their arrests under Section 54. Nor has such a suggestion been made to the media – local or foreign. There remains the alleged history, in relation to Hasnat, of links with Hizb-ut Tahrir, the banned extremists, from his NSU days. It is now well-known that the university fired four teachers in 2012 on account of links to Hizb-ut Tahrir. This was around the same period that Hasnat stopped working there, having joined in 2008. But was he actually one of the four teachers NSU fired? There seem to be conflicting reports on this. The only way to settle it was to get it from them, which we did on Monday by speaking to Belal Ahmed, head of NSU’s PR office. A former newspaper man himself, he started off by expressing his frustration over the rampant distortion of statements made by him and his vice-chancellor in various sections of the press, before stating: “I’m not here to serve anyone’s interest. Whatever links he may have had, I’m not aware of them. But on the issue of his leaving NSU, I can only go by the paperwork relating to it in front of me, and that tells us he left of his own accord in early 2013, to look after his father’s business.” On being pushed further, he said: “While he was here, some concerns were aired over his irregular teaching style, but he was never specifically asked to leave his job for membership of any banned organisation, as others were.” This finally was categorical. Which all begs the final question: why are the police holding on to them, even after all these days? What can they possibly gain from it? Well, quite a lot, it turns out. For one thing, there is the veneer of progress it allows them with regard to the investigation. The Section 54 arrests actually negate that, but then they can rely on most people not catching on. The more concrete gains might be in the form of what they can tell the police about these terrorists, who used their phones, chatted with them at length and most likely came to know quite a bit about them. Clearly Hasnat and Tahmid got closest to them, closer than any of the other hostages, or anyone else the police have managed to get their hands on. They probably want to eke out every possible bit of information they can from them and figure they would lose some of the leverage they currently enjoy in doing so by releasing them. That itself would be flawed thinking. But not nearly as flawed as grouping two innocents with the terrorists.