When the guards barged into his cell one evening as he was saying his nightly prayers, Mir Ahmad Bin Quasem Arman was convinced it was over.
"I thought I was being taken for execution," the lawyer said. "I said a last prayer in my mind for my passing to be quick."
It had been eight long years since Quasem was abducted from his Dhaka, Bangladesh, home by paramilitary forces and taken to a windowless cell in a secret prison, where he was kept in the dark, blindfolded and handcuffed for 24 hours a day, for months on end.
But that evening in August of last year, he was suddenly shuffled from his cell into a van and driven to an empty field, where his captors pushed him into a ditch.
The gunshot he was expecting never came. Quasem heard the van drive away instead.
"At the time I didn't know that there had been a change of regime, that the fascist [Hasina] had gone," Quasem, 40, told CBC News in an interview at his office in Bangladesh's capital Dhaka.
His abrupt release came days after Sheikh Hasina, the prime minister who had ruled Bangladesh with an iron fist for 15 years, fled the country aboard a helicopter, after protesters stormed her official residence following several weeks of bloody protests against her regime.
As the South Asian country — now run by interim leader Muhammad Yunus, who's promised steep reforms — tries to rebuild a robust democracy following the student-led uprising that ousted Hasina, stories like Quasem's have shocked the country, with a clearer picture emerging of the previous regime's treatment of dissenters.
Quasem is one of Bangladesh's "disappeared" — victims of a program that targeted Hasina's political opponents, with hundreds vanishing without a trace after being taken by security forces.
Many ended up in what was code-named the "House of...
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