US justice department provided evidence of Shafik Rehman’s link with plot to kill me: Joy

Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s son Sajeeb Ahmed Wazed Joy claims to have obtained the evidence of journalist Shafik Rehman’s involvement in the plot to kill him from the US justice department.

He made the claim in a Facebook post on Saturday evening, hours after the arrest of the chartered accountant-turned-journalist from his home in Dhaka.

Joy, also the ICT advisor to the prime minister, said, he faces risk as “my mother is in politics in Bangladesh and I help her from time to time.”

“It is also because our opposition party is of a particularly violent criminal bent and is allied with the largest fundamentalist party in the country with direct ties to ISIS,” he added.

About Rehman, Joy claimed the journalist was part of the plot in bribing an FBI agent to obtain information about him “to kidnap and kill me in the US”.

“The evidence against "journalist" Shafik Rehman comes directly from this case,” Joy wrote giving a URL link to the US Department of Justice’s press release.

“I'm not sure about the "prominent" part but I am the "citizen of Bangladesh" mentioned there,” the prime minister’s son wrote.

He also wrote, “Note I put the word journalist in quotes because once you're involved in trying to kidnap and kill someone I believe you have changed your career path from journalist to criminal. The BNP runs a mid-career course for that sort of thing.”

Rehman was picked up by Detective Branch officials from his home at Dhaka's Eskaton on Saturday morning.

After the arrest, DMP Deputy Commissioner (Media) Maruf Hossain Sardar said Rehman had been nabbed in a sedition case filed in 2015 with the Paltan police.

But later he said the journalist had been shown arrested in a case over his alleged involvement in the ‘plot to abduct' Joy.

In the afternoon, he was produced before a Dhaka court, which granted police a five-day remand to question him.