Mob attacks on Star, Prothom Alo scripted: Star-Dismislab analysis

On the night of December 18, 2025, coordinated mobs attacked and set fire to the offices of two of Bangladesh’s leading newspapers – The Daily Star and Prothom Alo – and the cultural institution Chhayanaut in Dhaka. The following evening, on December 19, the central office of Udichi Shilpigosthi, another cultural organisation, was also attacked and burned.

The Daily Star and Dismislab analysed 3,064 Facebook posts published between December 13 and 19 and found a clear link between online incitement and real-world violence. Over several days, hostile narratives against the two newspapers were built up by influencers and right-wing activists. It then escalated into direct calls to burn and attack buildings at named locations across Dhaka.

Crowds later gathered, carried out attacks, and moved from one target to another in line with what was being posted on Facebook in real time.

The evidence indicates that law enforcement agencies and Meta did not act on visible threats circulating on Facebook for more than 20 hours, even as the violence was being livestreamed. Phrases such as “Tonight,” “Right now,” and “Joy Bangla kore dite hobe (destroy them)” spread widely on Facebook, falsely describing the two newspapers as “Indian agents” and “anti-national forces.”

Calls for violence continued through the night, undetected and unaddressed, revealing sheer weaknesses in the monitoring and response capacity of the Bangladesh authorities, as well as in Meta’s ability to detect and moderate content that posed an imminent risk of harm.

Among the posts analysed, the first widely shared call for violence appeared on December 15, 2025, in a public Facebook group by a user based in Cox’s Bazar. The group called “Bharot Birodhi Churanto Andolon [Ultimate Anti-India Movement]” has 68,000 members.

The post, containing a photo of the Prothom Alo building marked out by a red cross, said, "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 [Joy Bangla Kora]”.

Originally, “Joy Bangla” is a Bangla phrase meaning “Victory to Bengal,” and has been in use since the 1971 Liberation War. In recent years, however, “Joy Bangla Kora” has taken on a very destructive meaning on social media, often used to imply destroying or eliminating something or someone.

Another Facebook post appeared on the same day in a different group titled “Bharot Birodhi Shoinik [Anti-India Soldier],” which has more than 100,000 members. The post, made by a group moderator named Md Fakrul Islam, stated: “Burn the offices of Prothom Alo and Daily Star.”

The direct calls to violence began intensifying from the night of December 17, roughly 32 hours before the actual event. It continued the next day.

Almost all the posts were made by profiles with real-sounding names, but with little to no personal information or regular social activities. Their online behaviour mostly involves posting and amplifying hate speech.

Since the late evening of December 18, 2025, the atmosphere was already tense in Dhaka and elsewhere. Emotions ran high across social media immediately after the death of Sharif Osman Bin Hadi, a potential candidate in the February election and convener of Inqilab Moncho, was announced around 9:40pm.

Soon, groups of protesters marched towards Shahbagh in the capital, which helped set the stage for the violence that unfolded throughout the night and the next day.

Findings show social media calls for violence were most frequent between 11:30pm on December 18 and 1:00am on December 19. This was the period when crowds began gathering, preparing for the assault, and carrying out the actual attacks on the two newspapers.

Around 11:15pm on December 18, a small group of individuals first gathered outside the Prothom Alo premises in Karwan Bazar, marking the start of a violent night. Over the next 30 minutes, the mob grew in size and became increasingly aggressive, and by 11:45pm, the attacks began.

Between 10:00pm and 11:00pm -- just before the mob assembled in front of the Bangla daily -- there were at least nine direct calls for violence posted on Facebook.

“Burn down Prothom Alo, demolish Daily Star to the ground, blow up the Indian Embassy and Indian hegemony,” one post declared. It was posted from a profile in a Facebook group called Pinaki Bhattacharya - পিনাকী ভট্টাচার্য, which has 157,000 members.

Pinaki Bhattacharya is a Bangladeshi national and social media influencer, currently living in France, with 3.1 million followers on Facebook. Pinaki is not among the administrators of this group, and during the violence, he made no posts directly calling for attacks. However, he has long positioned himself as a harsh critic of the two dailies and labelled both as pro-Indian outlets.

The volume of incitement surged over the next 45 minutes, between 11:00pm and 11:45pm, with 34 more unique posts directly calling for violence against the two newspapers. To draw attention, many posters used tactics such as tagging all their followers or adding hashtags like “#highlight”.

Sakib Ahmed was among those posting during that period, as people were starting to congregate. He posted in the “Bharot Birodhi Churanto Andolon” public group as well as in another group called “Bharot Birodhi Shoinik.”

“Prothom Alo, Daily Star, Kalbela! Tomorrow is their last day!!" his post read.

Together, the two groups have around 180,000 members.

Sakib, 21, is an undergraduate psychology student at Government Azizul Haque College in Bogura. “I saw that people were on the streets and I knew what would happen next. So I posted that to spread the word,” he told The Daily Star in January 2026. He insisted that no one instructed him to make the post.

Fifteen minutes after the attack began on Prothom Alo, US-based Bangladeshi influencer Elias Hossain issued his first direct call for violence of the night. “Come to Prothom Alo, everyone. Half the job is done,” he posted on Facebook at midnight. Within just one hour, the post garnered nearly 77,000 engagements.

Elias, once a journalist, posted his next call for violence five minutes later, writing, “Not a single brick of Prothom Alo must be left.” The post drew more than 95,000 engagements over the next hour.

Offline, the mob set fire to Prothom Alo around the same time.

Another post came five minutes later. “If the army comes to save Prothom Alo, give them the due answer.” This post received more engagement than each of the previous ones.

At 12:20am on December 19, he posted, “Prothom Alo done, now come to Daily Star everyone.”

Within four minutes of that, employees of The Daily Star rushed downstairs to escape the premises, only to find a mob gathering and hurling stones at the building. The Daily Star journalists and employees immediately ran upstairs and took shelter on the roof, where they were trapped in thick smoke until they were rescued after 4:00am. That post reached 77,000 people in one hour.

Elias went on to publish four more posts (1, 2, 3, 4) over the next three hours, each calling for further violence or justifying it. One post falsely claimed that no staff members were trapped inside the building, insisting instead that everyone had already escaped. Together, these four posts amassed more than 2.67 million engagements.

From midnight to half past midnight – the interval between the attacks on Prothom Alo and The Daily Star – direct calls for violence from other actors also intensified. During this period, 87 posts (excluding those from Elias) calling for or celebrating the attacks generated more than 30,000 engagements.

Other influential users provoked violence in similar language.

Former Vice-President of Zia Cyber Force, Meer Zahan, posted at 1:00am on December 19: “The list is not very long, add more if there are any. 1. Indira Gandhi Cultural Centre, Dhanmondi. 2. Chhayanaut, Dhanmondi. 3. Udichi. 3. Prothom Alo. 4. Daily Star. Unless these are 'Joy Bangla-ed', their jumping around won't stop.”

By 1:30pm on December 19, hours before the attack on the Udichi office was underway, this post had more than 8,500 reactions and was shared more than 300 times.

Additionally, various pages that claim to post satire and memes built hostile narratives against the two newspapers. Satirical Facebook page Anwar TV posted a photocard with images of Prothom Alo and The Daily Star buildings and wrote, “Prothom Alo and The Daily Star are the largest enablers of Indian hegemony in the country.”

On the ground, this online hate translated into a physical blockade of emergency rescue services, putting lives at risk. TV footage shows the mob obstructing fire‑service vehicles as they attempted to reach The Daily Star, forcing them to turn back, as 29 journalists and staff members remained trapped inside the burning building.

Around 12:35am on December 19, the attackers broke through the steel gate and glass doors of The Daily Star building and entered the premises. Inside, they set fires on the first three floors, destroyed computers and equipment and looted valuables from different floors.

A similar scene unfolded at Prothom Alo.

At 1:45am, an initial Fire Service unit arrived near the Karwan Bazar metro station but was intercepted by the mob, forcing it to retreat. The siege only began to ease when a portion of the mob diverted towards The Daily Star, thinning the crowd. Only then were the joint forces able to secure the perimeter, finally allowing firefighters to begin operations at 2:30am, nearly three hours after the fire was first ignited.

“That day, we faced several obstacles while trying to reach the accident sites. However, with the cooperation of the army, members of the law enforcement agencies, and many others present, we were ultimately able to reach the locations and douse the blaze,” Lt Col Mohammad Tajul Islam Chowdhury, Director (Operations and Maintenance) of the Bangladesh Fire Service and Civil Defence, told The Daily Star on February 8.

During the attacks, Bangladeshi law enforcers and security forces stood by as spectators. Several officers would later say, off the record, that they had received no instructions to intervene.

Two hours after the assault on The Daily Star and three hours after the arson attack on Prothom Alo, social media posts began identifying Chhayanaut Bhaban in Dhanmondi as the next target. The call to attack Chhayanaut was repeated at least 15 more times (1, 2, 3) before the institution was finally set ablaze around 1:30am on 19 December, leaving the building badly damaged.

The name appeared online as a target as early as 11:38pm on 18 December. One post, by a user named Faruk Khan, listed four locations – Prothom Alo, The Daily Star, Chhayanaut and the Indira Gandhi Cultural Centre – with their addresses. Exploiting Hadi’s death to justify the attacks, this poster wrote: “Tonight is the perfect time. If we miss the target, we will regret it again until we lose another Hadi.”

Faruk’s profile contained little personal information beyond a “Daripalla” badge (Daripalla is Jamaat’s electoral symbol). His post was copied verbatim by other users (1, 2). At that moment, at least one newspaper was already under attack.

Between the start of the violence and the following morning, 958 unique Facebook posts directly called for or celebrated the attacks (1, 2, 3, 4, 5), generating 360,455 likes, shares, and comments. And eight public Facebook groups (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8) with a combined membership of about 1 million at the time of the attack, published 88 posts (1, 2, 3, 4) inciting or justifying the violence, none of which were removed in real time.

The fourth major target, the central office of Bangladesh Udichi Shilpigosthi on Topkhana Road near Jatiya Press Club, was not attacked until around 7:00pm on 19 December. A fire broke out around 7:30pm and was brought under control 30-40 minutes later. No casualties were reported, but the building suffered extensive damage.

Threats against Udichi had circulated since the night of 18 December. At least 10 Facebook posts (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) called for the organisation to be destroyed and its members killed.

One post shared at 12:11am on 19 December read: “Chhayanaut, Udichi, Megh Mallar – we have to grab them one by one and slaughter them.” The account that posted it appeared anonymous and contained almost no personal information.

From late 18 December into the early hours of 19 December, the tone of online content shifted. Direct incitement gave way to celebration, satire, and mockery, with many users praising the attacks using expressions such as “Alhamdulillah” meaning “praise be to Allah.” Some users framed the assaults as the “right thing to do” or a “necessary step.”

At least 38 users circulated narratives seeking to justify the violence, including claims that closing The Daily Star, Prothom Alo and “Indian Embassy” would make the country 95 per cent healthy.

“As long as Prothom Alo and The Daily Star remain in this country, Indian hegemony will remain. Now is the time to bury Prothom Alo and Mujibism” one post reads. Various users also spread misinformation immediately after the arson that the fire on both media started from a gas stove or electric short circuit.

Findings show that the online posts that directly called for or celebrated attacks outnumbered narrative-building posts by roughly 20 to 1, and generated nearly 30 times more engagement.

But this adversarial campaign against The Daily Star and Prothom Alo did not begin in December 2025.

For more than a year beforehand, two Bangladeshi diaspora influencers, Pinaki Bhattacharya and Elias Hossain, had been consistently advancing a hostile narrative against the two outlets on Facebook and YouTube. They falsely accused the two papers of “serving Indian interests” and discrediting some of their reporting during Sheikh Hasina’s government.

Over time, a range of pages with satirical names mimicking the two newspapers, such as “Delhi Star,” “Delhir Alo,” and “Prothom Alu”, appeared on social media, frequently spreading misleading claims about their editors and editorial stance.

In November 2024, crowds gathered outside both newspapers for several days, chanting slogans that labelled them “Indian agents” and Sheikh Hasina’s “enablers.” Around the same time, Pinaki announced a “Zeyafat”, a ceremonial cow slaughter, outside the Prothom Alo and The Daily Star offices as part of a protest-celebration.

The December 2025 attacks followed a renewed wave of incitement triggered by the shooting of Sharif Osman Bin Hadi in Dhaka on 12 December. Posts circulating after the shooting essentially claimed that Prothom Alo and The Daily Star had “set the ground” for the incident.

After Hadi’s death on 18 December, this narrative intensified sharply (1, 2, 3), falsely branding the newspapers as “Indian agents,” “cultural fascists,” “agents of foreigners,” “associates of militant dramas,” “associates of the Pilkhana and Shapla killings,” “enemies of the revolution,” and “traitors”, making it a catalyst to organise a mob.

In an article earlier this month, Indian fact-checking portal boomlive.in wrote how, for more than a year, Pinaki and Elias have run parallel and often overlapping campaigns on Facebook and YouTube “to instigate and organise a series of mob attacks on political and media institutions in Bangladesh, thanks, partly, to their proximity to power.”

Despite days of threats circulating on social media and more than 20 hours of coordinated violence across four locations, the responses from Bangladeshi law enforcement and Meta came largely after the fact.

“Almost all major police units monitor social media to identify provocative or instigating posts that could undermine law and order or disrupt communal harmony,” AHM Shahadat Hossain, additional inspector general (Media and Public Relations) at Police Headquarters, told The Daily Star in January.

However, senior law enforcement sources said the police cyber wing lacks macro-monitoring tools and, in practice, monitors social media much like an ordinary user. Their capacity is largely limited to manual browsing, making it difficult to detect coordinated spikes in harmful content.

“When hate speech and smear campaigns endanger the safety of media outlets, journalists, artists and civil society leaders – and no corrective action is taken by government or platforms – it is only a matter of time before words translate into violence,” said Irene Khan, UN Special Rapporteur on freedom of opinion and expression, in a statement on 23 December 2025.

“The mob attacks [on Prothom Alo, The Daily Star, Chhyanaut and Udichi ] 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,” she added.

As violence unfolded, the Bangladesh Telecommunications Regulatory Commission (BTRC) reported 165 pieces of content to social media platforms from midnight on 18 December through 19 December, it told The Daily Star.

It added that many posts were reported for removal in the early hours of 19 December and that it held an online meeting with senior Facebook officials the same day, urging the platform to remove or block harmful content in the interest of public safety.

At 7:13pm on 19 December, about 20 hours after the first attacks began, the BTRC sent an urgent letter to Meta warning that online approval of Hadi’s death and calls for violence against media institutions were escalating.

The regulator said that despite “repeated requests from government and civil sources,” Meta did not cooperate in deactivating accounts that were inciting and mobilising violence, and that “multiple urgent requests” had not received timely responses.

Meta did not respond to The Daily Star’s request for comment.

Around the same time, the BTRC wrote to Meta, Shafiqul Alam, then press secretary to Chief Adviser Dr Muhammad Yunus, posted on Facebook acknowledging the state’s failure to act.

“Last night, I received frantic, tear-choked calls for help from my journalist friends at The Daily Star and Prothom Alo. I made scores of calls to the right people, trying to mobilise help, but it did not arrive in time,” he wrote, clearly frustrated that the government agencies he contacted did not respond fast enough.

“I am deeply sorry that I failed you,” he added.

On December 22, four days after the attack, SN Nazrul Islam, additional commissioner of Dhaka Metropolitan Police, briefed the media for the first time. “If we had gone into action, it might have escalated into live fire, they would have retaliated and attacked the police force. I don’t know what intentions they had that night – if two or four of my men were killed that night…

“You know that the police force suffered a trauma just a year ago and we had to work to bring them to their current state. The elections are ahead and if there were any police casualties, I would not be able to proceed [into the elections] with them.”

"The fact that no human life was lost in such a major incident is what we see as our achievement," he added.

DMP Commissioner Sheikh Md. Sazzat Ali did not respond to our requests for comments for this story.

Asked about the police response at a press conference on February 9, he said, "The attack on The Daily Star and Prothom Alo happened at 11:00 PM. However, due to traffic congestion, I could not send my officers there on time. If there hadn't been a traffic jam, we could have arrived much sooner.”

The now-former home adviser, Lt Gen (retd) Md Jahangir Alam Chowdhury, could not be reached even after several attempts. The Daily Star called and texted him in early February 2026.

All of the social media content analysed in this investigation breached Meta’s Community Standards on violence and incitement, particularly posts that identified specific targets and instructed mobs to attack them.

Meta’s own policy states: “We aim to prevent potential offline harm that may be related to content on Facebook… We remove language that incites or facilitates serious violence.” It further says the company removes content and disables accounts when it believes there is “a genuine risk of physical harm or direct threats to public safety,” and that it assesses language and context to distinguish casual statements from credible threats.

Despite this, a substantial portion of the analysed posts from 15 and 19 December were still accessible in late January, more than a month after the attacks.

Meta did remove the Facebook page of influencer Elias Hossain on the afternoon of December 19, 2025, several hours before the BTRC sent its formal letter to the company, but more than 12 hours after the offices of Prothom Alo, The Daily Star and Chhayanaut had already been vandalised, looted and set on fire.

Facebook posts from December 13-19, 2025, were collected by searching keywords such as Prothom Alo, The Daily Star, Delhi Star, Prothomalu, Chhayanaut and Udichi both during and in the aftermath of the attacks. The analysis then focused on posts that sought to legitimise attacks on these four institutions, explicitly called for such attacks, or mocked or celebrated the attacks in the aftermath.

Reporting: Zyma Islam

Additional reporting and research: Dismislab team, Mir Rownak

[Zyma Islam is a senior reporter and Mir Rownak is an intern at The Daily Star]