Eyewitness to the aftermath: A walk in the ruins of newsrooms
What was, only yesterday, a reception lobby and gallery of a leading English newspaper is now a low, blackened cavern
The first thing that hits you is the smell.
It hangs in the air of The Daily Star's ground floor like a living thing – a sour mix of burnt plastic, wood, wet ash and chemicals, clinging to the back of the throat long after you step inside. The water that saved the building now puddles across the floor strewn with shards of glass, turning the blackened remains of a newsroom into a nightmare. Every step sinks with a soft crunch, shards of glass and charred metal snapping under my snickers.
This is where the fire started when an enraged crowd descended on the English daily's Karwan Bazar office after midnight, hours after news broke that Inqilab Mancha spokesperson Sharif Osman Hadi had died in a Singapore hospital. First, the attack came to Prothom Alo's Karwan Bazar office, where the subsidiaries Prothoma Publication and Chorki were stationed. The mob broke in, vandalised floors and piled documents and computers into bonfires, then looted.
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What was, only yesterday, a reception lobby and gallery of a leading English newspaper is now a low, blackened cavern. The ceiling has partially collapsed, metal frames dangling dangerously from the ceiling. Heavy metal ducts fell at odd angles, like the ribs of some gutted beast. Electrical cables hang down in ugly tangles, copper guts exposed. Air conditioners stare back as scorched, twisted shells.
Tables, chairs and partitions have lost their familiar shapes. A row of workstations lies melted into each other – plastic keyboards turned to tar, monitors sagging into the ash. In one corner, a blue office chair has been burnt down to its metal spine, facing the street. Ledgers were on the floor beside a ceiling fan's skeleton. The glass façade that once separated the busy street from the newsroom is shattered; the firefighting water has carried fragments of it deep into the room. They glitter under the thin morning light, a cruel echo of the polished newsroom floor that used to be here.
On another side of the hall, where the flames appear to have been fiercest, the walls are no longer grey but a deep, blistered black. You can still see the finger-like tongues of smoke that the fire painted upwards, stopping just short of the ceiling before the water cannons doused the fire. Firefighters arrived here in the night, fighting both the blaze and, for a time, the hostility of the streets outside. It took six units, and support from the army, to bring the fire under control in the early hours of the morning.
Throughout those hours, dozens of Daily Star journalists and staff were trapped on the roof. Some, such as reporter Zyma Islam, posted desperate messages on social media: "I cannot breathe any more. There is too much smoke. I am inside. You are killing me." They were rescued at dawn.
Near one soot-stained column, a splash of colour breaks the monotony of black and grey. A half-burnt copy of The Daily Star lies on the ground, the masthead still visible, its front page story on Victory Day now edged with fire. The headline – "A nation born out of blood and grief" – peers out from a halo of ash, as if mocking the idea that fifty-four years after independence, newspapers in the capital can still be attacked and burnt for their coverage. The photograph of the Jatiya Sangsad Bhaban on that ruined page glows faintly green under the soot. It is hard not to read symbolism into the scene.
On the second floor landing, the first thing visible is the void where the ceiling used to be. Huge plates of plaster and insulation have fallen onto what was once a reception and editorial coordination area. Now they lie underfoot, fractured into jagged chunks.
The entire overhead structure is exposed: skeletal beams, ventilation ducts hanging like dislocated limbs, wiring charred to brittle black threads. The metal rods of the false ceiling sag downward, twisted from heat, and dangle dangerously like stalactites.
The flooring beneath is uneven. Ash has soaked into the pooled water, forming a slick slurry that shifts underfoot. Scattered among the debris are the half-melted remnants of office equipment: a landline telephone curled in on itself, the warped rim of a computer monitor, a wheel from an office chair.
Moving towards the third floor where the seminar used to be, the fire's violence becomes clearer. The stairwell walls show a tide line of smoke, rising from the base and stopping abruptly at the ceiling of the landing. The air here still carries the acrid sting of burned electrical wiring.
The room opens into a double-height atrium space, now blackened throughout. Above, the exposed belly of the mezzanine is charred. Sections of aluminium sheeting have peeled away like skin, revealing the rib-like reinforcing bars.
Looking up, you expect daylight to break through – but what you see is a jagged, soot-covered ceiling still intact in patches, like a night sky stained with smoke.
At the far end of the hall, the fire punched through the plasterboard wall, exposing a service corridor. Inside, PVC pipes run overhead, melted into overlapping drips. Thick black streaks race down the walls where smoke forced its way along the ceiling before escaping.
A cluster of policemen in stands near the mezzanine, inspecting the remains. The floors above – the admin, newsroom, multimedia, HR, all have been vandalised, destroyed and reduced to ruins. It is a ghastly sight to behold.
Members of civil society gathered there to demand justice for the assassination of Osman Hadi, resignation of the home adviser and arrest of the culprits attacking the newspaper.
From there, crossing the overbridge with the civil society members, I walked to Karwan Bazar, where the other half of last night's assault took place. Even before you reach the Prothom Alo building, the street tells you what happened. The road divider is streaked with burnt paper. A blackened trail of ash leads from the main carriageway up to the newspaper's entrance. The area is full of vegetable garbage, thickened into a quagmire of mush.
The façade of the four-storey Prothom Alo office looks as though it has been through a bombing. Rows of windows on the lower floors are completely blown out, their frames picked clean, leaving only jagged outlines. The outer concrete is discoloured, turning from cream to a sickly grey-brown. Soot stains climb upwards between the floors, and in places you can see the faint outlines of smoke that escaped through broken panels. The building next to it is almost blackened.
Tangled electric cables hang across the front like a spider's web gone mad, some melted together from the heat, others snapped and dangling freely. Behind them, charred beams protrude from the hollowed-out floors. Where there should have been desks and computers, there is now only open air and errant pieces of furniture – a lonely red fire extinguisher cabinet, a single intact chair, a filing unit somehow still upright against the far wall.
On the pavement below, curiosity and grief have drawn a crowd. Office workers from neighbouring towers, local residents, passers-by – they stand in clusters, staring up at the broken windows, talking in low voices. Some point at the building, recounting what they saw last night: young men climbing the façade, others smashing their way in, stacks of documents being flung down like confetti and then set ablaze as slogans filled the night air. "Inquilab zindabad", "Naraye takbir", "Bharoter dalalera hushiar" – slogans that turned two newsrooms into battlefields.
A line of yellow crime-scene tape runs in front of the building, held down at intervals by chunks of debris. Just beyond it lies a pile of burned books and magazines. One glossy feature spread has survived just enough to be legible. The photograph shows a woman in a red shawl treating a child in a hospital ward, an image from a story on medical care. The child's face is half-erased by ash. Only the eyes, surprisingly clear, look back at you from the rubble.
Looking up, you can still spot the floors where protesters broke in. Witnesses say youths climbed the four-storey structure, smashing glass and entering office spaces. Once inside, the attackers dragged out chairs, tables and computers, dumped them on the street and set them on fire, blocking fire service vehicles when they tried to come close.
There, the civil society members held a press conference, reiterating the earlier demands.
The attacks have forced both Prothom Alo and The Daily Star to suspend print publication for at least a day, with online operations limping along from improvised spaces and surviving equipment. For two newsrooms that have chronicled this country's turbulent politics for decades, being silenced by arson, even briefly, carries a heavy psychological weight.
The July Uprising stirred hopes of a better country among us. It was supposed to be, as many hoped aloud, the moment Bangladesh stepped away from the politics of intimidation and toward accountable democracy.
Walking through the burnt-out shells of two of the country's largest newsrooms, that promise feels unbearably distant. The very voices men and women once turned to for clarity and truth have been silenced by smoke and ash. Where the uprising sought openness, transparency and dignity, the reality here is twisted metal, shattered glass and journalists rescued from rooftops by cranes under armed escort.
If July represented a door cracked open toward a freer future, the charred remnants of these buildings suggest how quickly old habits reclaim the streets. The attack underscores a bitter truth: reforms do not end with the fall of a regime. In the ash of burnt front pages celebrating Victory Day and the charred shells of two of Bangladesh's biggest newsrooms, the question hangs in the air as sharply as the smell of smoke: in a nation born out of blood and grief, how much more violence must truth endure?
