A court in Dhaka has remanded two people on charges of slandering Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina and her sister Sheikh Rehana on video-sharing site YouTube.
Dhaka Metropolitan Magistrate Ahsan Habib granted police three days each to interrogate Khaled Bin Ahmed, 30, and Md Hizbullah, 22 on Sunday.
Uttara West police produced the duo before the court and sought 10 days to grill them.
According to case dossiers, the accused admitted that they are activists of the Jamaat-e-Islami student wing Islami Chhatra Shibir. They took over a YouTube channel styled, ‘SKTV’ from one Milon Hossain on Jun 2 and used it to disseminate anti-state contents.
The YouTube channel has 1.5m subscribers.
The remand plea placed before the court also mentions that the duo earned huge sum of money by spreading such misinformation. Ahmed deposited Tk 4 million in an Al Arafah Islami bank account, Tk 1m in a Brac bank account and Tk 300,000 in an Islami Bank account maintained by his wife Salma Akter.
On Friday (Oct 5), the Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) arrested Ahmed and Hizbullah from the capital’s Uttara during a raid.
Khalid ran the YouTube channel styled ‘SKTV’, where he uploaded footage aired by credible media outlets and distorted them to spread ‘anti-state’ propaganda, RAB told the media on Saturday.
RAB-1 chief Lt Col Sarwar bin Kashem said, “Khalid has been uploading anti-state propaganda and defamatory rumours against prominent people of the country,”
“We have found enough evidence to implicate them but we need to investigate to find out whether any political party were behind it,” added the senior RAB officer Kashem.