A journalist working for French news agency Agence France-Presse (AFP) acted as an intermediary between student leaders in Bangladesh and Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus before Sheikh Hasina was forced from power in August 2024, according to a claim by Yunus’s former press secretary Shafiqul Alam.In a Facebook post on October 28, Alam alleged that Qadaruddin Shishir, who was then with AFP’s fact-checking team in Dhaka, helped arrange initial discussions between Yunus and student leaders who wanted him to head an interim government after Hasina’s departure.Alam’s account suggests that discussions about who would lead Bangladesh after Hasina had begun before she fled the country on August 5, 2024.Describing how the contact was established, Alam wrote: “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.”Alam said Shishir managed the discussions discreetly while working alongside him at the AFP bureau in Dhaka.“At the time, Shishir was the editor of AFP Dhaka Fact Check team. Sitting just a yard away from my desk in the AFP Dhaka bureau, he managed this high-stakes operation 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.”According to Alam, the initial contact took place two days before Hasina’s departure. He claimed the secrecy was essential because the then prime minister’s security apparatus could have discovered the discussions.“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).”
Shafiqul Alam is Yunus’s former press secretary.
Aynaghar is the name associated with a secret detention facility in Bangladesh, where allegations of enforced disappearances and torture have been reported.Alam also said Shishir had been collecting video evidence of violence during the crackdown on protesters.“Throughout it all, Shishir remained remarkably cool and composed, even as he quietly started gathering video evidence of the cold-blooded murders being committed by the regime.”
Yunus took charge after Hasina fled
The student-led protests began in July 2024 as an agitation against government job quotas before escalating into a wider movement against Hasina’s government. She fled Bangladesh on August 5 amid the unrest.On August 6, student protest leaders publicly proposed Yunus as the head of an interim administration. He returned to Dhaka from Paris and took office as chief adviser on August 8.The revelations in Alam’s post add details about the contacts that preceded Yunus’s appointment. They also raise questions about how student leaders prepared for a possible transition of power before Hasina’s departure.However, evidence of discussions about a successor does not, by itself, prove that the protests as a whole were planned or controlled by a single group. Alam’s account has not independently established the extent of coordination between the student leadership and other actors.Hasina has since accused the Yunus administration of political persecution and failing to hold those responsible for violence accountable. Yunus’s interim administration governed Bangladesh until February 2026, when it handed over power following the election of Tarique Rahman as prime minister.
