Bangladeshi Journalist Receives Key to City

 

Pictured left to right:

Mayor Wildes, Bangladeshi Journalist Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury, & Teaneck Mayor Elie Katz

 

Mayor Wildes awarded the City's highest honor, with a Key to the City to Bangladeshi-Muslim journalist and editor, Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury. Teaneck Mayor Elie Katz joined Mayor Wildes as a bolster of support and issued a Certificate of Commendation from the Teaneck Township.

In November 2003, Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury was arrested at the Dhaka-Zia International Airport just before boarding a plane which, via a connecting flight, would have taken him to Tel Aviv. Having accepted an invitation from the Hebrew Writers' Association to deliver an address promoting understanding between Muslims and Jews, he had been scheduled to be the first Bangladeshi journalist to visit Israel.

Instead, he was arrested and charged by the Bangladeshi government with blasphemy, sedition, treason, and espionage on behalf of Israel. He was held in prison for 17 months and reportedly tortured until an American congressman, alerted by a friend of Mr. Choudhury's, intervened in his case.

Mr. Choudhury was freed in April 2005. But his nightmare was far from over. The authorities in Bangladesh, which is ruled by a coalition government that includes two Islamist extremist parties that advocate imposing Muslim Sharia law, decided to pursue the case. Mr. Choudhury is now on trial, and, if found guilty, he faces the death penalty.

 

 

 

 

Paid for by Friends of Michael J. Wildes For Mayor, Assemblyman Arnold Brown, Treasurer

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