Mushtaq Ahmed ran Bangladesh's first commercial crocodile farm and wrote a memoir about it. A handful of Facebook posts criticizing the government's COVID-19 response were enough to put him in a cell for nine months, and he never came out.
Before he became a name attached to a law, Mushtaq Ahmed was known in Bangladesh, to the extent he was known at all, as the man who started the country's first commercial crocodile farm. He wrote a memoir about it, "Kumir Chashir Diary," or "Diary of a Crocodile Farmer," and had earned an affectionate nickname, Kumir Bhai, Crocodile Brother. He was fifty two years old, a father, a husband to Masiha Akhter Lipa, and by early 2020 he had turned his attention, like a great many people confined at home by a pandemic, to writing on Facebook about how his government was handling it.
Officers from the Rapid Action Battalion came for him at his home in Dhaka's Lalmatia neighborhood in early May 2020. The specific hour is disputed, but the substance is not: Ahmed was accused, alongside the cartoonist Ahmed Kabir Kishore and roughly ten other people, of posting content critical of the government's coronavirus response and was charged under the Digital Security Act of 2018, a law passed two years earlier that criminalized a broad and loosely defined category of online speech. Mahfuz Anam, editor of The Daily Star, later summarized the charges against Ahmed as accusing him of "running a campaign against the Liberation War, Father of the Nation, National Anthem, etc," while noting that "the investigators provided no proof of any kind."
What followed was not a trial. It was a wait. The Digital Security Act permits prosecutors up to 105 days to complete an investigation before formal charges must be filed; in Ahmed's case, charges were not framed until February 2021, roughly eight months after his arrest. In the meantime he was held at Kashimpur High Security Jail outside Dhaka, and his lawyers applied for bail six separate times. Each request was denied. Family visits, barred for pandemic reasons, did not happen either.
On February 23, 2021, Ahmed appeared in court and, by every account available, looked healthy. Two days later he was dead. Prison officials said he had "suddenly fell ill" that evening and was rushed to a nearby hospital, where he was pronounced dead. The jail's senior superintendent, Md Gias Uddin, described him afterward as "very gentle and quiet," a man who "did not complain about any issues" beyond taking the occasional tablet for a stomach ailment. A government committee later attributed the death to natural causes. The report was never made public.
Ahmed's father, Abdur Razzaque, put it more simply after his son's death: "They have committed grave injustice with my son. I am not in a position to say anything further. My only son is dead."
The clearest window into what had happened inside the case came not from Ahmed, who could no longer speak, but from his co-defendant, the cartoonist Ahmed Kabir Kishore. Kishore had been detained around the same time over a series of drawings titled "Life in the Time of Corona," and he later described, in interviews with the Committee to Protect Journalists and The Daily Star, being seized by men in plain clothes who broke down his door, beaten about the head until his eardrum burst, and interrogated with questions like "who did you draw? Did you draw the prime minister?" He described seeing Ahmed at a Rapid Action Battalion facility "smelling strongly of urine," having, in Kishore's account, "defecated in his pants from the torture."
Kishore spent ten months in detention before the High Court, in a ruling delivered by Justice M. Enayetur Rahim and Justice Md Mustafizur Rahman, granted him bail on March 3, 2021, a week after Ahmed's death and after six earlier bail applications had failed in the lower courts. He was released the following day, by his brother's account emaciated, with permanent damage to his hearing and a leg injury that made it difficult to walk. "I am having to hear that it is because he died that I am free," Kishore said of Ahmed.
He was a crocodile farmer who wrote a book about crocodile farming, then wrote some Facebook posts, and died in a high security prison without ever being convicted of anything.
Ahmed's death set off protests in Dhaka within days, with demonstrators gathering at the University of Dhaka and the National Press Club and police responding with batons and tear gas. Rights organizations, foreign diplomats, and Bangladeshi writers converged on a single demand: repeal the Digital Security Act. Brad Adams of Human Rights Watch said flatly that "posting satire about the ruling Awami League on Facebook should not amount to the equivalent of a death sentence." Thirteen ambassadors and high commissioners posted in Dhaka issued a joint statement calling for a transparent, independent investigation. Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina's response was terse: "What can be done if someone falls ill and dies?"
The law itself outlasted the outrage for a while. It was formally replaced in September 2023 by the Cyber Security Act, which retained most of the same provisions under a different name; Amnesty International called the replacement a "draconian" law dressed in new language. It was not until May 2025, under the interim government that took power after Sheikh Hasina's ouster, that the Cyber Security Act was itself repealed and replaced with a new ordinance. By then, Mushtaq Ahmed had been dead for more than four years, and the law that had held him without trial for the last nine months of his life was gone in name only for most of that time.
Ahmed's case was never an isolated one. Roughly two thousand cases were filed under the Digital Security Act between 2018 and early 2021, a volume that turned a law originally pitched as a tool against cyberfraud and hacking into the government's preferred instrument for silencing online critics. The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights at the time, Michelle Bachelet, called for a prompt, transparent, and independent investigation into the death and urged a broader review of the law itself. Sixty six Bangladeshi writers signed a joint statement demanding justice and the Act's abolition, and the opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party went further still, describing the death as state-sponsored murder. Anthony Bellanger of the International Federation of Journalists said simply that "this writer should have never been imprisoned let alone die in a high security jail." Saad Hammadi of Amnesty International's South Asia team put the underlying principle even more plainly: "no one should have to die solely for exercising their right to freedom of expression."