While two former Chief Election Commissioners – Nurul Huda and Kazi Habibul Awal currently are in police remand on allegations of their involvement behind 2018 and 2024 farce elections in Bangladesh, which took place under the rule of Awami League, one of the top-enablers of these highly-controversial elections – Mawlana Muhammad Abed Ali, surprisingly remains out of radar – either of the media or the authorities concerned.

Following the December 30 general elections in 2018, where the ruling Awami League and its leftist-Islamist coalition won 290 out of 300 seats in the parliament, an investigative report by Dhaka’s leading English newspaper, The Daily Star, exposed the dubious nature of “foreign observers” who had praised the election as “peaceful” and “credible”. The report suggests that these observers may have been sponsored or affiliated with the ruling party and its Islamist ally, Jatiya Party.

In the report titled – ‘দু’টি নির্বাচন পর্যবেক্ষক সংস্থা সমাচার’ [All about the two observer agencies] published on January 8, 2019, The Daily Star said, two election monitoring organization which were covered in the Bangladeshi and international media to prove credibility of the election were ‘SAARC Human Rights Foundation’ and ‘Election Monitoring Forum’. These two organizations held a press conference on December 31 in Dhaka’s National Press saying, “Eleventh parliamentary elections have been better, fair and neutral than the past”.

The two observer organizations in question were the ‘SAARC Human Rights Foundation’ and ‘Election Monitoring Forum.’ Notably, the ‘SAARC Human Rights Foundation’ is not affiliated with the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) and is led by a radical Muslim named Mawlana Mohammad Abed Ali.

Interestingly, Abed Ali is also the Executive Director of the ‘Election Monitoring Forum,’ an organization that lacks a........

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