An AFP journalist secretly helped student protesters establish contact with Muhammad Yunus even before PM Sheikh Hasina fled Bangladesh on August 5, 2024.
The revelation by Yunus's former press secretary, himself an ex-AFP journalist, raises fresh questions about how the Nobel laureate was approached to lead a post-Hasina government following the regime change in Bangladesh.
Shafiqul Alam, then the bureau head of AFP in Dhaka, said in a post on Facebook on Wednesday, October, 28 that the protesters needed a "bridge-builder" in August 2024 and his colleague in AFP's fact-check department, Qadaruddin Shishir, "stepped up to fulfil that critical role".
The July-August protests, which began as a student-led anti-quota agitation, had been projected as a spontaneous protest against Sheikh Hasina's government. However, more evidence has now emerged that the toppling of the Hasina-led government might have been what some would term a "regime-change operation".
India Today Digital was the first to report on the role played by Army officers and Islamists in the protests that forced Hasina to leave Bangladesh on August 5, 2024.
In the Facebook post, Alam alleged that an Agence France-Presse (AFP) journalist became a link between Yunus and the protesters conspiring to overthrow Hasina as Bangladesh's prime minister.
"When student leaders wanted to reach out to Nobel Laureate Professor Muhammad Yunus and invite him to head the interim government in a post-Hasina scenario, they needed a trusted bridge-builder. Qadaruddin Shishir stepped up to fulfill that critical role," the Yunus aide wrote.
Qadaruddin Shishir was then the editor of AFP Dhaka's fact-check team. Alam wrote that Shishir "managed" the "high-stakes operation" of regime change in "complete secrecy".
"Only a select few trusted individuals knew what was happening. It was Shishir who first approached the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize winner on behalf of the student leaders and facilitated the initial talks between the two parties," he noted.
"Hasina would remain in power for two more days, yet her brutal security machine--notorious for mass killings and abductions--never caught a whisper of it. Had they discovered what was happening, Shishir and our entire AFP team would likely have ended up in an Aynaghar (house of mirrors secret prison)," Alam said.
He went on to praise the journalist's "cool and composure", while, according to him, he "quietly started gathering video evidence of the cold-blooded murders being committed by the regime."
After Sheikh Hasina's Awami League government was toppled, an interim administration led by Yunus assumed office on August 8, 2024, and governed Bangladesh for the next one and a half years. In 2025, Hasina was tried in absentia by a special tribunal and sentenced to death. The interim government also disbanded her Awami League party and sought her extradition from India.
Hasina has accused the Yunus administration of allowing perpetrators of violence to escape accountability while pursuing politically motivated cases against Awami League members. She has also alleged that political repression and a culture of fear had continued under subsequent political arrangements.
Recently, during his US visit, Yunus was heckled by purported supporters of the disbanded Awami League at New York's John F. Kennedy Airport. In a video of the incident that later went viral, the protesters were seen shouting, "You are a terrorist, murderer!" "Why you come here?" and "You killed thousands of police officers in my country", as a bewildered-looking Yunus left the airport.
However, giving another version about the so-called autocratic style of functioning of Sheikh Hasina, a report in Dhaka-based 'Daily Star' says:
"Once Sheikh Hasina had succeeded in dismantling institutions — including civil society organisations — and believed that she had established a kind of ideological dominance over society and politics, she institutionalised this system under the conviction of her own invincibility.
"This is reflected in a 2018 statement by Mohammad Hanif, Joint General Secretary of the Awami League: "As long as Sheikh Hasina lives, the Awami League will remain in power" (Bangla Tribune, 25 April 2018).
Hanif's remark sparked controversy, but it had no impact on Hasina or her party leaders.
In 2022, then Home Minister Asaduzzaman Khan Kamal said, "We must try to keep Sheikh Hasina in power for life" (Dhaka Times, 21 May 2022).
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