The Midnight Siege
“I can’t breathe any more. There’s too much smoke. I’m inside. You are killing me.” These words, posted on Facebook at 1:00am on December 19, 2025, came not from a war correspondent on a distant battlefield, but from Zyma Islam, an investigative journalist trapped on the roof of her own newsroom in Dhaka. The 28-year-old reporter was among 28 journalists and staff members cornered by a violent mob that had stormed the headquarters of The Daily Star, Bangladesh’s largest English-language newspaper, and set the building ablaze.
Islam had been filing the lead story on the death of Sharif Osman Hadi, a prominent youth leader who had helped oust former prime minister Sheikh Hasina during the August 2024 uprising. Hadi had died that evening in a Singapore hospital, six days after being shot by masked gunmen outside a Dhaka mosque. As Islam submitted her final paragraphs shortly after midnight, the first warnings reached the newsroom: crowds were marching on Kazi Nazrul Islam Avenue, the capital’s media row, and another mob was converging on Prothom Alo, the country’s leading Bengali-language daily and The Daily Star’s sister publication.
The threats had been mounting for days. Social media posts had branded both newspapers “Indian agents” and accused them of downplaying Hadi’s assassination. Protesters claimed the papers had “set the ground” for his killing, allegations that lacked evidence but spread rapidly through an already inflamed political climate. Yet the journalists remained at their desks. “We don’t stop the press. Not for nothing,” Islam later recounted. “If we stopped every time there was a threat, we wouldn’t go to print on many days.”
Five minutes past midnight, Islam hit “submit” on her story and headed downstairs. Then came the sound of bricks smashing glass. “It wasn’t sporadic. It was furious. You could tell there were a lot of people outside,” she said. While some colleagues managed to flee, 28 staff members including Islam retreated upward, climbing nine floors in darkness to reach the roof. They dragged heavy planters across the iron door and waited, listening to the destruction below.
The Spark That Ignited the Violence
The immediate trigger for the violence was the death of Sharif Osman Hadi, a 32-year-old firebrand who had emerged as a spokesperson for Inqilab Mancha, an anti-government platform that grew from the 2024 student uprising. Hadi was an outspoken critic of India and Sheikh Hasina’s Awami League, which he accused of authoritarianism and subservience to New Delhi. He was campaigning for the February 2026 parliamentary elections as an independent candidate from Dhaka-8 when unidentified gunmen shot him in the head on December 12.
Within hours of his death announcement at 9:40pm on December 18, protests erupted across Dhaka. Crowds marched toward Shahbagh, the city’s protest hub, chanting “India killed Hadi” and carrying banners accusing the interim government of negligence. But the anger quickly pivoted toward the media. Protesters accused The Daily Star and Prothom Alo of being “Delhi’s lapdog” and “Sheikh Hasina’s enabler,” claims the newspapers vigorously denied. The rhetoric drew on deep resentments that had been building since Hasina fled to India in August 2024, with many Bangladeshis viewing New Delhi as the enabler of her 15-year autocratic rule.
“This wasn’t just about justice for one man,” said Zaheer Ahmad, a political analyst in Dhaka. “Hadi’s death became a vessel for accumulated anger, against the state, against elites, and against India.” That anger found tangible targets in two newsrooms that had long maintained independent editorial lines, surviving harassment under Hasina’s government only to face a more primal threat from the streets.
Nightlong Mayhem at Two Newsrooms
The assault on Prothom Alo began around 11:15pm, when a group of 30 to 35 people marched from Shahbagh to the newspaper’s Karwan Bazar headquarters. Police initially blocked them, but the crowd grew as social media calls amplified across Facebook groups with hundreds of thousands of members. By 11:45pm, the attackers had shattered the glass facade, broken through the main gate, and stormed the four-story building.
What followed was systematic destruction. The mob threw furniture from upper floors, gathered it in piles, and set it alight. They looted more than 150 computers and laptops, smashed CCTV cameras, destroyed fire safety equipment, and broke open cash lockers. On the ground floor, they ransacked the Prothoma Prokashon bookstore, stealing books and merchandise. Food from the office canteen was taken. The attackers worked methodically, chanting slogans and celebrating as flames rose. By 1:00am, the fire threatened neighboring buildings and electrical connections.
Meanwhile, at The Daily Star’s nine-story office 600 meters away, the siege began around midnight. As the mob forced its way through steel gates and glass doors, the 28 trapped staffers huddled on the roof, watching fires spread below. They soaked shirts and handkerchiefs in water and pressed them to their mouths, lying flat to find pockets of cleaner air in the thick black smoke. “If I held my hand in front of my face, I couldn’t see it. It wasn’t grey. It was black,” Islam recalled. Some broke down, calling parents with farewells. One colleague collapsed from smoke inhalation. Another prepared to jump to an adjacent building two floors below, before being restrained.
Downstairs, colleagues who had escaped relayed terrifying updates: some attackers carried firearms and crude bombs, and were “planning an assassination.” The mob blocked fire service vehicles attempting to reach the building, forcing them to retreat. A Fire Service unit that approached Prothom Alo at 1:45am was attacked and driven back. Only when part of the mob diverted to The Daily Star did the perimeter thin enough for joint forces to secure the area, allowing firefighters to begin operations at 2:30am, nearly three hours after the blazes began.
The Rescue and Aftermath
Army personnel finally reached The Daily Star roof at 4:30am, more than four hours after the staff had fled upward. They formed a cordon to hold the crowd back while the trapped journalists descended nine floors of smoke-choked stairs, using wet shirts as makeshift masks against the toxic air. At the bottom, a ladder propped against the rear wall led to a broken rickshaw van positioned by the army to break their fall. “We climbed up and jumped onto the rickshaw,” Islam said. Some were injured in the escape, but all 28 survived.
The damage was catastrophic. At The Daily Star, the ground-floor auditorium was gutted, the cafeteria looted, and archives torched. The photo department lost 35 years of visual history as cameras and hard drives were stolen. Administrative offices were stripped bare. At Prothom Alo, the building was completely burned out, with nothing remaining on the first three floors. The accounts department was reduced to ashes, and the OTT platform Chorki sustained extensive damage. The Daily Star estimated losses at $2 million.
For the first time in their histories, both newspapers fell silent. Prothom Alo, operating for 27 years, and The Daily Star, publishing for 34 years, both failed to produce their Friday morning editions. Yet within 15 hours, journalists who had spent the night gasping for air on a rooftop were working remotely, filing stories for the next day’s paper. The Daily Star’s December 20 edition carried a single-word headline: “Unbowed.”
Scripted Hate: The Social Media Machinery
An investigation by The Daily Star and Dismislab, a fact-checking organization, later revealed that the attacks were not spontaneous but carefully orchestrated through social media over days and hours. Analyzing 3,064 Facebook posts published between December 13 and 19, researchers found a clear pipeline from online incitement to real-world violence.
The first widely shared call for violence appeared on December 15 in a public Facebook group called “Bharot Birodhi Churanto Andolon” (Ultimate Anti-India Movement), which has 68,000 members. A post marked the Prothom Alo building with a red cross, stating: “These are India’s powerhouses in Bangladesh. This country will not be safe until all Indian agents, including Prothom Alo and Daily Star, are Joy Bangla-ed.” The phrase “Joy Bangla,” originally a liberation slogan meaning “Victory to Bengal,” has been repurposed on social media as code for destruction or elimination.
Between 10:00pm and 11:00pm on December 18, at least nine direct calls for violence appeared on Facebook. Between 11:00pm and 11:45pm, as crowds gathered at Prothom Alo, 34 more posts explicitly called for attacks. US-based Bangladeshi influencer Elias Hossain issued a series of directives: at midnight, he posted “Come to Prothom Alo, everyone. Half the job is done,” followed five minutes later by “Not a single brick of Prothom Alo must be left.” At 12:20am, he directed the mob to its next target: “Prothom Alo done, now come to Daily Star everyone.” Within four minutes, The Daily Star staff were rushing upstairs to the roof.
Other targets followed in social media posts, including Chhayanaut, a cultural institution established in 1961, and Udichi Shilpigosthi. Both were attacked and burned in the following hours. The investigation found that eight public Facebook groups with approximately 1 million combined members published 88 posts inciting violence, none of which were removed in real time by Meta, despite violating the platform’s Community Standards on violence and incitement.
A Failure of Protection
The most troubling questions surround the absence of state protection. Despite threats circulating openly on Facebook for more than 20 hours, and despite frantic calls from trapped journalists to government officials, security forces largely stood by as spectators. Shafiqul Alam, then press secretary to Chief Adviser Muhammad Yunus, later posted a public apology on Facebook: “I made scores of calls to the right people, trying to mobilise help, but it did not arrive in time. I wish I could dig up a great piece of earth and bury myself in shame.”
Police later offered conflicting explanations. Dhaka Metropolitan Police additional commissioner SN Nazrul Islam suggested that intervening might have escalated to live fire, risking officer casualties before upcoming elections. Commissioner Sheikh Md. Sazzat Ali claimed traffic congestion prevented timely arrival, despite the attacks lasting nearly five hours. Journalists reported that officers who did reach the scene stood as “silent spectators,” with some admitting off the record that they had received no orders to intervene.
The interim government led by Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus, which took office after Hasina’s ouster, has faced mounting criticism for failing to restore order. Political analyst Asif Shahan, a professor at the University of Dhaka, described the attacks as “a reflection of the interim government’s failure to control the rise of mobocracy.” Under the Yunus administration, the nature of threats to journalists has shifted from predictable state repression to unpredictable mob violence. “What we are seeing now is a shift from institutional repression to popular violence,” said Nazmul Ahsan, executive editor of Netra News. “That makes the risks harder to calculate and much harder to protect against.”
The Broader Assault on Truth
The December attacks marked merely the most visible eruption of a sustained campaign against Bangladeshi media. Since the August 2024 transition, at least 1,073 journalists have faced physical assaults, lawsuits, killings, threats, imprisonment, and property seizures, according to Transparency International. At least 140 journalists now face murder charges related to coverage of the 2024 protests, a tactic rarely seen under the previous government. More than 300 journalists have been banned from leaving the country, and 167 have had press cards cancelled.
The climate of intimidation has fostered widespread self-censorship. “Today, we don’t even use our press cards in public,” said Tanjila Tasnim, a Daily Star reporter. “If people find out we are journalists, especially from The Daily Star, there is a fear they might attack us.” Reporters describe verifying every fact with greater rigor, avoiding certain topics, and hesitating to identify themselves in public spaces. The attacks have also targeted minority communities, with at least 15 Hindu minority members murdered between December 2025 and January 2026, including journalist Rana Pratap Bairagi.
International press freedom organizations have condemned the violence. The UN Special Rapporteur on freedom of opinion and expression, Irene Khan, stated that the attacks “did not emerge in a vacuum but are the consequences of the interim government’s failure to address impunity and uphold media and artistic freedom.” Bangladesh currently ranks 149 out of 180 countries in the World Press Freedom Index.
Defiance in the Ashes
Nearly three months after the attacks, The Daily Star’s building still bears the scars. Insurers sift through debris near piles of shattered glass at the entrance, and the auditorium remains a burnt-out shell. Yet the paper continues publishing. Reporters who spent hours on a rooftop fearing death returned to work within hours of their rescue. “Those people who were trapped there and were afraid for their lives started working after just 15 hours,” said Kamal Ahmed, the managing editor. “This resilience, we are not going to give up.”
For Zyma Islam, the attack has not altered her commitment to reporting, though it has changed her sense of safety. “Doing journalism in Bangladesh has never been about being safe. We are used to death threats. When we get them, we just take precautions,” she said. When asked if that night was the most significant of her life, she shook her head. “Bangladesh isn’t a conflict zone. But it doesn’t give the same rights and protections to its journalists the way democracies are supposed to. We got through one night. We can get through another.” She paused, then added: “Let them come at us.”
The February 2026 elections loom as a critical test for Bangladesh’s democracy. With 127 million registered voters, the polls will determine whether the country can restore civilian rule after months of interim governance. Yet for the press, the question is whether journalism can survive in an environment where the newsroom itself has become a battleground, and where telling the truth carries the risk of being burned alive.
Key Points
- Twenty-eight journalists and staff were trapped for over four hours on the roof of The Daily Star’s Dhaka headquarters after a mob set the building ablaze on December 19, 2025.
- The attacks targeted both The Daily Star and Prothom Alo, Bangladesh’s leading English and Bengali newspapers, marking the first time both failed to publish in their combined 61-year history.
- Violence erupted following the death of Sharif Osman Hadi, a 32-year-old anti-India activist and youth leader who was shot six days earlier.
- Investigations revealed the attacks were coordinated via Facebook, with influencers posting real-time instructions to mobs, including explicit calls to burn specific buildings.
- Security forces stood by for hours despite frantic calls for help; police later cited fears of escalation and traffic congestion as reasons for non-intervention.
- Attackers looted over 150 computers, destroyed 35 years of photo archives, and caused an estimated $2 million in damage at The Daily Star alone.
- Army personnel rescued the trapped staff at approximately 4:30am after firefighters were blocked by mobs.
- Both newspapers resumed operations within 15 hours, with The Daily Star publishing an edition headlined “Unbowed.”
- Only 37 arrests have been made, and organizers behind the coordinated violence remain at large.
- Bangladesh ranks 149 out of 180 countries in the World Press Freedom Index, with over 1,000 journalists facing assaults, lawsuits, or threats since the August 2024 government transition.
