Enforced disappearance: SMS records suggest victim was being tracked

For seven years, Anisha Islam Insha had stood on city pavements holding a photo of her father at every protest arranged by rights organisations working on enforced disappearances.

Her father, Ismail Hossain, was a timber trader who went missing from Dhaka on June 19, 2019, when Insha was only 13 years old.

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Every year since then, she braved the wrath of the very state that had allegedly abducted her father, got bodily jostled by law enforcement and even had her megaphone snatched away by the police at a time when she was only a child.

After the Sheikh Hasina government fell on August 5, 2024, Insha bravely walked up to the Directorate General Forces Intelligence Headquarters the very next day and demanded that they return her father, who was a member of Zia Parishad, a pro-BNP organisation.

But Insha’s father was not there. The day after the protest, the security forces informed the protesters that they had released everyone in their custody. Insha was taken to square one, wondering where her father was.

“I spent years trying to make people believe that my father was not just missing, that he had not just left us, that he was forcibly disappeared,” Insha, now 20, told The Daily Star.

One potential breakthrough came this year when investigators at the International Crimes Tribunal found the Call Detail Records (CDR) of her father weeks before his disappearance.

Investigators and technology experts say the messages Ismail received resemble “trigger SMSs”, indicating that he was under surveillance.

A CDR is a log generated by a telecommunications operator that records the technical details of communications. It includes calling and receiving numbers, the date and time of the communication, the duration, the type of service used (voice call, SMS, or data session), and the cell tower handling the connection.

The CDRs handed over to law enforcement by telecom operators generally do not contain the content of calls or messages.

A trigger message, on the other hand, is a machine-generated message sent to the device of the target being surveilled to track the location of the cell tower they are connected to at that moment.

“These messages often resemble automated promotional messages that telecom operators send to their users several times a day with internet pack offers or call rates,” said Tanveer Hossain Zoha, a prosecutor with the International Crimes Tribunal and a digital forensics specialist.

Then how and why do the investigators suspect that the messages in Ismail Hossain’s phone were not just regular SMSs promoting the latest data pack?

DEVIL IS IN DETAIL

Over a span of 20 days, between June 1 and June 19, 2019, when Ismail Hossain was allegedly picked up, his phone number registered 62 calls and messages.

These included 20 calls made from regular phone numbers with various call durations. The other 42 records were text messages.

Between June 1 and June 5, 2019, these messages had fairly normal patterns. There were two messages on June 1, six hours apart from each other. Then two messages the next day about 20 minutes apart, none the next day, and only one each on June 4 and June 5, 2019.

The pattern changed on June 6, 2019. At 1:45pm, he got two messages from the same code within six seconds of each other.

Almost every single day from then on till the day of his disappearance, he got messages in pairs, each within five to seven seconds of each other.

Senior telecommunications officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said mobile operators do not ordinarily send promotional messages in rapid bursts. Such messages are typically spaced out over time rather than delivered within seconds of one another.

They noted that the only common exception occurs when a subscriber has not used a SIM card for 90 days, prompting the operator to send multiple notifications at once.

That was not the case with Ismail, whose CDR also logs normal phone calls being made and received.

On the day of his disappearance, he got a pair of these messages at 12:31pm, one six seconds apart from the other.

According to the general diary filed by Ismail’s wife Nasrin Jahan Smrity, on the evening of that day, Ismail Hossain was picking up spare car parts near Mirpur-1 in Dhaka when men identifying themselves as members of the Rapid Action Battalion (RAB-4) forced him into a microbus.

“When I went to the police station to file a missing persons report, the officer tracked his cellphone and found it turning towards RAB-4,” said Nasrin, a claim The Daily Star could not independently verify.

On the day before Ismail’s disappearance, five messages, first as a pair at 12:37pm and then as a set of three at 5:15pm. Each time, the messages were spaced five to six seconds apart.

“Each of these messages triggered the location of the cell tower his cell phone was connected to at that particular moment,” explained Tanveer.

The Daily Star has independently had the CDR inspected by three people with knowledge about trigger messages who all agreed that Tanveer’s was the likeliest interpretation.

“Trigger messages have historically been used to intercept devices or surveil targeted individuals. We have seen precedent of this in Bangladesh, particularly in cases of politically motivated surveillance, enforced disappearances and protests,” said Sabhanaz Rashid Diya, who leads Tech Global Institute, which has published a research report on Bangladesh’s surveillance infrastructure.

She, however, noted that a final conclusion about the nature and motive of the messages would require extensive forensic investigations.

The final report of the Commission on the Inquiry of Enforced Disappearance said that “silent pick-ups -- unobtrusive abductions -- were virtually impossible without mobile surveillance to pinpoint the victim’s location with precision.”

It mentioned an internal army inquiry into the abduction of Brigadier Abdullahil Azmi as stating, “DGFI’s Dhaka Det [Detachment]had been conducting surveillance on Brigadier Azmi for at least a month prior to his abduction.”

While the investigation into the disappearance of Ismail Hossain is ongoing, ICT investigators have zeroed in on RAB-4 as the potential party associated with the case.

The preliminary investigation report of the case states that when the team visited RAB-4 to collect a document called the “command certificate” of that particular day, they found it to be missing.

“During inquiry, RAB representatives have been unable to explain how, under which internal rule, or in the presence of which officers, the relevant Command Certificate was allegedly destroyed or rendered unavailable,” it added.

Despite multiple attempts, The Daily Star failed to reach RAB for comment.