‘Worse than death’: Victims describe the nightmare of Bangladesh’s secret prisons during former regime [Video]

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 …