'I can't breathe any more': Inside the night a mob burned a newspaper

I can't breathe any more. There's too much smoke. I'm inside. You are killing me.

Zyma Islam typed that on Facebook well past midnight on 18 December. She was not reporting from a battlefield.

She was trapped on the roof of her own newsroom in Dhaka, one of 28 journalists and staff cornered by a mob that had set their building ablaze.

That evening Islam, an investigative reporter at The Daily Star - Bangladesh's largest English-language newspaper - was filing the lead story on the death of Sharif Osman Hadi, a prominent figure in the youth movement that had ousted former prime minister Sheikh Hasina in August.

Hadi had been shot by masked attackers outside a Dhaka mosque the previous week and died in a Singapore hospital.

Islam was still writing when the first warning reached the newsroom: a crowd was marching on Kazi Nazrul Islam Avenue - the capital's media row.

Another mob was moving towards the offices of its sister newspaper and Bangladesh's leading Bengali-language daily Prothom Alo.

Protesters accused the papers of "setting the ground" for Hadi's killing - an allegation without evidence, but potent in an already inflamed political climate.

Threats had been mounting since Hadi's murder.

Social media posts branded the papers "Indian agents", accusing them of downplaying the assassination - an accusation amplified by the leader's own anti-India rhetoric.

There had been protests outside their offices.

At The Daily Star, Islam and her colleagues were working furiously to finish writing and put the paper to bed.

We don't stop the press. Not for nothing," Islam says. "If we stopped every time there was a threat, we wouldn't go to print on many days.

Five minutes past midnight, she hit "submit" on her story and headed downstairs to the ground floor. "I was the last to turn off my computer," she recalls. Then came the sound - bricks smashing glass.

It wasn't sporadic. It was furious. You could tell there were a lot of people outside.

Some had made it out of the building. Others heard the din rising from below and retreated. Twenty-eight journalists and staff - including two women - were still inside.

Some suggested locking themselves inside the newsroom. Islam argued otherwise. "There were quite a few of us who were very clear that we have to go to a place with open air and with easy access to the fire service."

We knew they would burn the building," Islam says quietly. "So we went up to the roof before the fire even started.

They headed for the stairwell, climbing nine floors in the dark.

At 00:24 local time (18:24 GMT) she was still on the phone to the police as she climbed. By 00:50, the smoke had swallowed everything.

If I held my hand in front of my face, I couldn't see it. It wasn't grey. It was black.

On the rooftop - a small garden with large potted palms - they locked the iron door and dragged the heavy planters across it. "Fire doors are never locked," she says, almost clinically. "But in this case the mob were going to use the fire exit to reach us."

From the rooftop, the trapped journalists could see the mob gathering below. Instinctively, Islam says, they kept away from the edges. Along the banisters were motion-activated lights - one wrong step and they would flare on, announcing their presence.

Fifteen minutes later, the building was on fire.

"I can't say exactly when they set it alight. What I know is this: by around 12:50, the smoke was so thick I couldn't see my own hand in front of my face," Islam says.

The fire, set below, was funelling up the elevator shaft.

There was a tap on the roof and many soaked shirts and handkerchief in water and pressed them to their mouths. They lay flat to find cleaner air. They called out to one another in the dark. They tried to find "pockets of air" in the smoke.

Downstairs, colleagues who had melted into the mob relayed frantic messages: some attackers were carrying firearms and crude bombs, and were "planning an assassination".

On the roof, a few broke down - calling parents, offering farewells, asking forgiveness. Islam did not.

One man was ready to jump - from our roof to the next building, two floors below. "We had to stop him from doing that," says Islam.

"One colleague collapsed in front of me," she says. "That's when I got scared. I thought - we might see the first fatality." That was when she posted her frantic Facebook post in the smoke and the darkness.

At some point, Islam called her parents - her father, a sailor, and her mother, a teacher - who were at a family function outside Dhaka. There was no goodbye, no grand farewell.

I'm not that kind of person.

She kept it spare. I'm here. I'm stuck. We'll figure something out.

"Doing journalism in Bangladesh has never been about being safe. We are used to death threats. When we get them, we just take precautions," says Islam.

The army rescue came at half past four in the morning. They would form a cordon, hold the crowd back for a few minutes. The staffers trapped on the roof would run down the fire escape, then scale a wall at the back.

That is what happened.

The staffers finally bolted down nine storeys of smoke-choked stairs - no masks, just wet shirts and jackets pressed to their faces. Firefighters had smashed windows along the way. It helped, barely.

At the bottom, there was a ladder propped against the rear wall. On the other side, the army had positioned a broken rickshaw van to break the fall.

"We climbed up and jumped onto the rickshaw," says Islam.

Some were injured - not everyone was young or agile - but there was no alternative. They had been on that roof for four hours.

"The four hours felt like half an hour - everything was moving so fast. By the time I got out, my phone had long died. I couldn't believe it was nearly dawn. Up on that roof, it had felt like one endless midnight," remembers Islam.

In a side alley - eerily quiet - they lay low as the mob ransacked the newsroom. Amid the noise and looting, they slipped away. Army vehicles ferried them to a nearby camp.

Islam went home, called her parents and slept briefly before checking into an hospital emergency room for nebulisers.

"I took a day off. I had a bit of carbon monoxide poisoning," she says, almost lightly.

The Daily Star did not print that morning - a first in its 34-year history. But the interruption lasted just 15 hours.The office was gutted and unusable; staff worked remotely. Within two weeks, two editorial floors were repaired. They were back at their desks.

Nearly three months on, the building still carries the attack in its bones: insurers picking through debris, piles of glass heaped by the entrance, the auditorium a burnt-out shell. Foreign diplomats still file through, surveying the devastation - a reminder that the assault reverberated well beyond the newsroom.

Below the roof where staff had cowered on the fateful night, the mob had unleashed what the paper later called "nightlong mayhem".

Furniture was smashed, archives torched, a photo exhibition torn down and burned. The ground-floor auditorium was gutted, the cafeteria looted. Stationery stores went up in flames; the conference hall, library and 100-seat auditorium were vandalised; the video studio charred.

The photo department - and 35 years of archives - was stripped bare, cameras and hard drives stolen. Administrative offices were looted. The attackers climbed as high as the seventh floor, smashing glass. Only thick smoke, perhaps, spared the server room.

Yet by the next day reporters were working from home; broken glass was replaced; laptops sourced; the sixth-floor newsroom patched up.

The 20 December morning paper arrived with a single-word headline: "Unbowed". Much of the eight-page edition was written and edited by journalists who had spent the night on a rooftop.

Those people who were trapped there and were afraid for their lives started working after just 15 hours," says Kamal Ahmed, the managing editor. "This resilience - we are not going to give up.

The Daily Star estimates its losses at about $2m - a steep toll for a single night of violence.

Yet nearly three months on, the only arrests are the 37 made in the immediate aftermath - 11 in its case and 26 in Prothom Alo's. Police say they have identified a man who incited the violence on social media but have yet to apprehend him. Who planned and orchestrated the attacks - and why - still remains unclear.

I ask Islam if the night of the attack was the most significant night of her life? She shakes her head.

"Bangladesh isn't a conflict zone. But it doesn't gives the same rights and protections to its journalists the way democracies are supposed to," she says.

We got through one night. We can get through another.

Then comes a line that sounds less like defiance than habit:

Let them come at us.

Source: BBC
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