Draft:Nazmul Ahasan

Nazmul Ahasan (নাজমুল আহসান) is a Bangladeshi journalist and a Washington, D.C.-based reporter for Bloomberg News..

While attending UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, he led the production of an interactive report, titled Body Count, on extrajudicial executions in Bangladesh, which was among the ten projects worldwide that won Sigma Awards, a professional data journalism accolade, in 2024.

Ahasan is also among the recipients of the Global Shining Light Awards by the Global Investigative Journalism Network.

Career
Ahasan’s journalism career began in 2014 when he joined Bengali vernacular, Manab Zamin, and went on to work as a member of the editorial staff at The Daily Star in 2017. He also commented to major global publications, including San Francisco Chronicle, Grist , and Al Jazeera

While in Bangladesh, he contributed to The Daily Telegraph, Devex and Columbia Journalism Review on the country’s handling of the Rohingya refugee crisis and the Covid-19 pandemic.

In 2019, the journalist was first to interview Deepak Aggarwal, a suspected Indian bookie, for an inaugural piece for Netra News. Aggarwal had undisclosed interactions with cricketer Shakib Al Hasan, for which International Cricket Council (ICC) had suspended Hasan for two years.

The story revealed Heath Streak, a former Zimbabwean cricketer and then-coach of the Bangladesh Cricket Team, facilitated the connections between Aggarwal and Hasan. Two years after these revelations, the ICC imposed an eight-year ban on Streak for divulging confidential information to bookmakers, including during his tenure as the Bangladesh bowling coach.

Bertus de Jong, a writer for Cricbuzz, highlighted the reporting on Twitter after the ICC announced its sanctions.

In an investigative report for Netra News, Ahasan revealed that Bangladesh’s junior minister for power, energy and natural resources, Nasrul Hamid, signed off a $305 million preliminary agreement between his ministry and an entity jointly controlled by his aides, family members and two global energy giants that also conducted business with his ministry.

Ahasan moved to the United States in 2021 to pursue graduate studies in journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, partly supported by Berkeley Journalism Fellowship and Chowdhury Fellowship at the Chowdhury Center for Bangladesh Studies.

At UC Berkeley, Ahasan was part of the Investigative Reporting Program, where he contributed to a story for The Mercury News on police use of force in San Jose and worked on documenting excessive force for the California Reporting Project.

While working for Investigative Reporting Workshop, he contributed to The Washington Post’s coverage of local elections in Washington, D.C., and a data project on 2020 election denialism by Republican nominees and candidates.

Commentaries and controversies
In an interview with The Guardian in 2023, he acknowledged the practice of self-censorship at The Daily Star during his tenure. Recalling his experience at that time, he said, “We didn’t know which pieces could land us in trouble. We didn’t have a clear picture of what might happen to us or our contributors, so we tended to exercise random, arbitrary judgment on which stories to run.”

Writing for Haaretz in 2020, he defended Bangladesh’s diplomatic stance towards Israel, responding to a previous opinion piece that advocated for establishing bilateral ties.

In a piece for Foreign Policy a year later, Ahasan argued in favor of the U.S. sanctions imposed on Bangladesh’s elite police unit, Rapid Action Battalion, for alleged acts of extrajudicial executions and enforced disappearances.

He called out Bangladeshi officials criticizing police killings in the United States in response as an example of “tu quoque fallacy”. By doing so, he wrote, “the Bangladeshi authorities are inadvertently acknowledging the allegations themselves—and simply denying the U.S. government’s moral standing to point them out.”

Responding to the op-ed piece on Jurist, Quianna Canada, then a B.A. law student at the University of Arizona, said, “Bangladesh’s implication that the international community applies a different set of standards for the United States as it pertains to extrajudicial executions is not wrong.”

Sajeeb Wazed, who is based in the U.S. and serves as the official advisor to his mother, Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, shared the rejoinder on his verified Facebook profile. Ahasan’s original article had cited an earlier statement from Wazed.

In January 2023, after Bangladeshi authorities decided to pull books written by three dissenting authors from a large book fair in Dhaka, Ahasan reportedly helped start an online campaign to buy the banned books. He called the campaign “a symbolic resistance to a nonsensical act of government suppression.”

Awards
Along with Tasneem Khalil and others, he was awarded the Global Shining Light Awards (Certificate of Excellence) in 2023 by Global Investigative Journalism Network for their role in uncovering a secret torture cell, Aynaghar, in Dhaka. A panel of judges called the exposé “in any circumstances, the bravest example of Bangladeshi journalism.”

In awarding Ahasan a Sigma for a story on extrajudicial killings in Bangladesh, a judge called it “an exceptional data journalism effort” that is “a sign of a future where cross border data journalism can protect reporters in unsafe environments while at the same time uncovering extremely important issues.”

Ahasan was also among the recipients of scholarships offered by the South Asian Journalists’ Association (SAJA) in 2022.