Joy wants Daily Star editor detained

Sajeeb Wazed Joy, Prime Minister’s ICT affairs advisor, has demanded that The Daily Star Editor Mahfuz Anam be detained for trying to facilitate a military coup.

Joy made the demand in his Facebook status posted at 2.19am on Friday.

Joy wrote on his Facebook wall: ‘Mahfuz Anam, Editor of The Daily Star, has admitted he published false corruptions stories against my mother Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina to defame her.’

He said it was ‘treason’ committed by the editor of a major newspaper because he had run ‘a false smear campaign to assist in a military coup’.

Joy accused the senior journalist of ‘constantly writing against politicians as being unethical and corrupt’.

On Wednesday, Mahfuz Anam at a TV talk-show admitted his ‘big mistake’ by running uncorroborated stories fed by DGFI during the 2007-8 military-controlled caretaker regimes. Those stories claimed Hasina had taken bribes.