The studio belonging to Salman Mohammad Muqtadir, one of Bangladesh's best-known content creators, was vandalised and looted on Saturday night in Dhaka's ECB Chattar area. His studio, BrownFish, operated out of a rented tin-roofed structure on the New Gini Properties housing project.
The attack began around 10:30pm, according to bdnews24.com. Salman posted a video of the aftermath on his verified Facebook page the same night.
What the people inside described
Two employees were in BrownFish when it started. One of them told bdnews24.com that 100 to 150 people arrived and began hacking at the studio's shutters before forcing their way in.
"They got inside very quickly and started smashing everything," he said. "They took everything they could and destroyed whatever they couldn't take."
The two hid in a washroom. They were found. "They had large machetes and guns. They told us to hand over whatever we had," the employee said. "They took our phones and wallets — whatever we had. They took everything."
The video Salman posted shows the scale of it: chairs, tables, televisions, furniture and equipment broken across the floor. Several studio staff are visible crying. "There was an attack here a little while ago, our entire studio has been destroyed in this attack," he says in the video.
Two accounts of why
Salman's own explanation is that the attackers were not after him. He has said the property owner may have been facing extortion demands, and that his studio was damaged as collateral. "While trying to damage his property, my property got damaged," he said.
Police give a different reason. Mohammad Nazmul Haque, assistant commissioner of Dhaka Metropolitan Police's Cantonment Zone, said the studio was not the target and that the incident came out of a dispute over the property — that one side went there late at night to take possession of it, and the studio was vandalised at the time.
Speaking to Prothom Alo, the Cantonment zone assistant commissioner said the dispute was over land between New Guini Properties Limited and the owner of the neighbouring plot, and was explicit that "there was no extortion incident here".
Three people have been detained, on Saturday night and Sunday morning. Police said no case had been filed over the incident at that point. Note that a detention is not a charge and settles nothing about what happened — a distinction we set out in our explainer on how a complaint moves through a Bangladeshi court.
What happens to the studio
Salman has said he intends to keep working. "I will do something bigger than this," he said.
The reason this landed so hard is the scale of what he reaches. Salman built one of the country's largest online followings, and BrownFish is not a hobby room — it is a working production studio with staff, cameras, lighting, edit machines and a schedule. A night like this does not interrupt a channel; it stops a business, and it stops the income of everyone who works there.
