Foreign workers deported from Singapore over extreme Facebook posts, arrested as they land home

Tayani Md Risad, 25, and Islam Sahedul, 37, were investigated separately in July, an ISD spokeswoman said, The Straits Times reported.

Risad’s posts expressed support for Shafiur Rahman Farabi, a Bangladeshi Islamist blogger who spent a decade in prison over the murder of a writer he had spent years threatening online.

Dhaka’s Anti-Terrorism Special Tribunal sentenced Farabi to life imprisonment on Feb. 16, 2021 for the machete killing of Bangladeshi-American blogger Avijit Roy, hacked to death outside a Dhaka book fair in 2015. Five members of Ansar al-Islam were sentenced to death in the same verdict.

Bangladesh’s Rapid Action Battalion named Farabi a member of Hizb ut-Tahrir, banned in the country since October 2009. He left Kashimpur High Security Central Jail on Aug. 22, 2025 on High Court bail, The Business Standard reported.

Sahedul made inflammatory posts about the Israel-Iran conflict and described Muslims who do not want to live under Islamic law as infidels, the ISD said.

Investigations found no indication either man intended to carry out an attack or was involved in terrorism activity in Singapore.

“However, their extremist and divisive views are inimical to Singapore’s multiracial and multi-religious society,” the spokeswoman said.

The ISD has not said what work the two men did in Singapore.

They landed at Hazrat Shahjalal International Airport in Dhaka on July 8 and were taken into custody by airport police acting on information from the Counter Terrorism and Transnational Crime unit, according to the police remand petition reported by The Daily Star. Officers seized three mobile phones and three passports.

Singapore’s Ministry of Home Affairs said in November 2020 that 15 Bangladeshis and one Malaysian had been repatriated after ISD investigations into posts that incited violence or stoked communal unrest in response to that year’s attacks in France. Most of the Bangladeshis worked in construction.

The ISD detained eight Bangladeshi nationals in 2016 as members of a clandestine group calling itself Islamic State in Bangladesh, which held documents on weapons and bomb-making and had raised money for firearms to attack targets back home. Five other Bangladeshi workers found with jihadi material were deported.

Singapore arrested 27 Bangladeshi construction workers in late 2015, describing them as a closed religious study group that supported the armed jihad ideology of al-Qaeda and Islamic State, and deported 26. Bangladeshi police charged 14 of them over links to Ansarullah Bangla Team.