Activist and former beauty queen Meghna Alam recalls that she first met Essa Yousef Al Duhailan, then Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to Bangladesh, at an event in Dhaka last September.
Al Duhailan, she claims, pursued her with charm. First he gave her a copy of the Quran, a prayer mat and a prayer dress as gifts. Then he sent flowers, jewellery, and even 200kg of dates labelled a “Gift from the King of Saudi Arabia”.
What followed is a saga that has gripped Bangladeshi gossip columns for months, but also had real and damaging consequences for Alam’s reputation, career and even her liberty. Brands have dropped their associations with her, and she has been arrested and accused of jeopardising her country’s relationship with Saudi Arabia, an important ally.
Alam became a national celebrity when she won the Miss Earth Bangladesh pageant in 2020. She now chairs the Miss Bangladesh Foundation and identifies herself as a “political leadership trainer”.
Now 30 years old, Alam says she was initially hesitant when the ambassador’s advances began. But they soon embarked on a romantic relationship, she says. It was a whirlwind: intense, but brief.
“I also did like the fact that a very powerful man was pursuing me,” she tells The Independent.
“So, I am not lying about this, okay? He seemed like a very genuine person. I can understand now that things were rushing too fast.”
Alam was drawn in by the attention that Duhailan showered on her. She says the envoy told her he was divorced, and gave her a diamond ring.
But, she says, there was a caveat.
Duhailan told her, Alam claims, that Saudi Arabian diplomats were not allowed to marry Bangladeshi nationals. Alam was taken aback. If they got married, Duhailan allegedly told her, it would not be recognised and have any legal basis in his home country.
In 2021, multiple news reports, citing the Makkah Daily, suggested that Saudi Arabia had banned its men from marrying women from Pakistan, Bangladesh, Myanmar, and Chad. The Independent has reached out to Saudi Arabian authorities for clarification.
Even as talk of Alam and Duhailan’s marriage was in the air, rumours started circulating in their circles that she had gotten pregnant and had an abortion. In a Muslim society like Bangladesh’s, pre-marital relations are frowned upon, and pregnancy or abortion outside of marriage is taboo.
Alam felt targeted. She tells The Independent that brands refused to work with her after these rumours started flying.
“People were literally telling me, we cannot have a brand ambassador who’s had an abortion,” she says, “who had an illegitimate child, with the ambassador.”
These, she insists, were all lies.
A few months after they first met, Alam says she received a call from a woman who identified herself as Duhailan’s wife. The caller allegedly told her that Duhailan was fooling her. At one point she even racially abused Alam, allegedly telling her that “he will be ashamed to even tell his friends that he loves a Bangal”.
Shocked by the caller’s claim that Duhailan was married, Alam says she returned most of his gifts. She kept the Quran, the prayer mat and a few other items of religious meaning. And she demanded that Duhailan clarify the rumours about her having aborted his child.
“I was so furious,” she recalls.
Alam says the diplomat had a “good, positive image”. She claims he would hold her shoes, feed her with his hands and be “so helpful all the time”.
In the wake of the call, all she needed from him, she says, was to “provide a proper closure and an apology”.
She warned him that she would make a formal complaint if he didn’t speak out and clear her name.
The next day, 9 April 2025, when Alam was still processing her confrontation with Duhailan, there was a knock on her door.
Plain-clothed men declared they were there to talk about her birth certificate and alleged there were drugs in her house.
Alam says she was terrified and confused. She went live on Facebook to document what was happening.
What followed was two days of interrogation in a secretive government facility, she alleges, where she was cut off from her family, stripped of her phone and laptop, and pressured to retract her statements. It was an ordeal she describes as psychological torment designed to break her will.
She was taken to the Detective Branch headquarters, she alleges, a place notorious during ousted leader Sheikh Hasina’s rule for enforced disappearances.
Inside, officers subjected her to intense questioning, compelling her to erase the live Facebook video and pressuring her to hand over her passwords.
Alam alleges she was arrested before a formal complaint had been filed. She was charged days after her detention.
The Independent has reached out to the Dhaka Metropolitan Police for comment.
Alam says she was detained under flawed legal procedures after officials warned that displeasing the Saudi ambassador could threaten Bangladesh’s economic relations with Riyadh. Local media reports said that she was accused of fraud, extortion, and “honey-trapping” diplomats. She was in addition accused of harming relations with Saudi Arabia.
Police charged that, along with businessman Dewan Samir, CEO of Kawaii Group, and several other people, Alam was part of a syndicate that used women to entrap foreign diplomats and wealthy Bangladeshi traders in romantic schemes, extorting money by threatening to tarnish their reputations.
On 10 April, a midnight court reportedly ordered Alam’s 30-day detention under the Special Powers Act, citing a threat to public safety.
The next day, police claimed she had endangered state security and foreign relations.
She was granted bail on 28 April, the Dhaka Tribune reported.
Alam says that while she was in detention, her photos from public events where she appeared with former ministers or at the Indian High Commission were circulated online by unknown accounts to falsely portray her as a prostitute or foreign agent, “undermining my work and identity”.
In the meantime, a group of 27 women’s rights advocates wrote to Muhammad Yunus, Bangladesh’s interim leader, demanding Alam’s immediate release. The letter, signed by lawyers, academics, artists and other professionals, condemned the circumstances of her arrest, including the use of nearly 30 officers, detention without a warrant, and alleged violations of her fundamental rights.
Amnesty International said it was “deeply concerned about the use of the Special Powers Act for the arrest of model Meghna Alam. The draconian legislation, with vague, overbroad provisions, has historically been used to arbitrarily detain people for long periods of time, without charge, and without judicial oversight”.
“These all constitute gross violations of due process safeguards and international human rights standards and best practices,” the rights group noted. “As per media reports, Meghna’s detention was shrouded in secrecy, and was allegedly carried out without a warrant, which are considered to be alarming violations of procedural safeguards. We call on the authorities to either charge Meghna with an internationally recognisable crime or release her. They must also end the use of and repeal the Special Powers Act.”
Alam claims Duhailan left Bangladesh the very day she was detained. “He deactivated his SIM, deleted his LinkedIn and Facebook accounts,” she adds.
The Independent couldn’t find an online presence for Duhailan. Both the Saudi embassy in Dhaka and the Saudi foreign ministry have been contacted for comment, but had not replied at the time of publication.
Alam has since moved back in with her parents. She is thankful that they have been supportive.
She had to give away her apartment, she says, due to harassment in the wake of the scandal.
She also says she endured severe psychological and emotional distress due to her unlawful detention, character assassination, and harassment.
“They dragged it to an extent that it made me an object of shame for the whole society,” she says, fighting back tears.
“A lot of people who don’t know me at all are saying stuff like, I have been a prostitute for this person. I’m going to the court every month and people think that I pull a lot of stunts, but, to be honest, I know there is no legal way to fight him, because the whole government is plotting to save him.”
The Independent has contacted the Bangladeshi home affairs ministry for comment.
To demonstrate that there was nothing illicit about her relationship with the diplomat, Alam always took a few symbolic personal items he had given her – like the Quran and the prayer dress – to all her court dates.
It is almost a year since Alam first met the diplomat and she is still struggling to put her life back together.
“If there are continuously ‘anti-state’ kind of statements being made about me, I mean, no matter how positive I want to be, this is an obstruction to my work,” Alam says. “This has been five months, and this way I cannot survive.”
