On 18 October 2025, 28-year-old Swarnamoyee Biswas, a junior graphic designer at Dhaka Stream, was found dead in her apartment in Dhaka’s Dhanmondi area. Police initially recorded the case as a suspected suicide and sent her body for autopsy. Her death quickly drew public attention, not only because she was a young media professional, but also because it followed months of workplace complaints involving sexual harassment allegations within the organization.
Earlier, on 13 July 2025, Swarnamoyee and around 26 colleagues submitted a written complaint to the Human Resources department accusing senior editor Altaf Shahnewaz of sexual harassment, verbal abuse, intimidation, and professional misconduct. Following the complaint, Dhaka Stream stated that Shahnewaz had been withdrawn from the newsroom and that a two-member inquiry committee had been formed to investigate the allegations.
In a statement released on 19 October 2025, Dhaka Stream said the inquiry found evidence of discourteous behavior by Shahnewaz toward colleagues and confirmed that he would remain removed from newsroom duties. The organization also announced the introduction of an internal code of conduct and said it would cooperate with any official investigation.
In the days following Swarnamoyee’s death, 243 journalists, writers, and civil society members issued a joint statement calling for an independent investigation into both the circumstances of her death and the handling of the workplace harassment complaints. The statement referenced Bangladesh’s High Court guidelines on preventing sexual harassment in institutions and workplaces.
Despite the initial public attention, no further findings from the inquiry committee have been publicly released. There has also been no widely reported update from law enforcement regarding the investigation into Swarnamoyee Biswas’s death.
As of March 2026, nearly five months later, the questions raised by her case remain unresolved.
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