Bangladesh police quiz YouTuber Salman Muqtadir over controversial video

Police have interrogated YouTuber Salman Muqtadir, who has drawn a minister’s attention after releasing a controversial music video.

Staff Correspondentbdnews24.com
Published : 19 Feb 2019, 05:53 PM
Updated : 20 Feb 2019, 08:49 AM

The young entertainer was summoned to the Detective Branch office on Dhaka’s Minto Road where he was quizzed on Tuesday afternoon.

“Salman Muqtadir was called today. He was interrogated for around one and a half hours,” said ASM Al Kibria, an additional deputy commissioner of police’s Counter Terrorism and Transnational Crime unit. 

He declined commenting on why the YouTuber was quizzed.

It comes a day after Post, Telecommunication and IT Minister Mustafa Jabbar in a Facebook post inquired about Salman.

“Can someone tell me what the condition of Salman Muqtadir is today?” the minister wrote.   

Many have been demanding interrogation of Salman since police quizzed actress Sanai Mahbub over her controversial videos posted on the social media a few days ago.

When speculations went rife that police detained Salman, bdnews24.com tried to contact him, but he was unavailable on phone.

He wrote on Facebook around 8pm that he was not arrested but removed the post later.  

Finally when bdnews24.com reached him on phone, he said he himself contacted police to know about Bangladesh’s YouTube content regulations on hearing “different things” about himself in past few days.

He said he had made the music video, “Obhodro Prem”, mainly for Indian viewers and switched it off for users in Bangladesh “for now” after “discussions about it”.

“Police were not rude to me,” he said about the “meeting” at the DB office.

Salman, a popular YouTuber in Bangladesh, has over 1 million subscribers to his channel and around 1.6 million followers on Facebook.

Many are critical of his “Obhodro Prem” alleging it is vulgar.