On Thursday, June 19, Singer Mainul Ahsan Nobel, more popularly known as just Nobel, married his rape victim, Israt Jahan Priya, in Keraniganj Central Jail. The marriage proceedings were done under the supervision of prison authorities, and witnesses from both parties were present.
Nobel was in jail following the rape case Israt Jahan Priya had filed against him, citing that he had held her captive for seven months in his home, during which time he raped her. And shockingly, this marriage was court-ordered. An actual judge approved the decision to bond a rape victim to their rapist, by law, for the rest of her life.
One month before this tragic incident, on May 19, police had arrested Nobel at 2 in the morning at his residence in Demra due to the rape case. This arrest was confirmed by an inspector at Demra Police Station, Md Murad Hossain. The night before, Israt Jahan Priya had filed the case against Nobel, stating that he had kidnapped and then confined her to his house for seven months. She alleged that in these seven months, he had continuously raped and tortured her. She further went on to say that Nobel would videotape the abuse and then use it to blackmail her. She was then sent to a hospital.
Then the next day, on May 20, he was produced before a court, where Metropolitan Magistrate Zia Uddin Ahmed rejected Nobel’s lawyers’ request for bail and instead ordered his detention. Nobel claimed that Israt was his wife, but no legal document was brought in at court to back up this doubtful claim.
The details of this case are worse than the initial news, because the victim was rescued via devastating circumstances. Israt was a former Eden Mohila college student, and she connected with Nobel on Facebook back in 2018, when they formed a connection and used to speak on the phone regularly with each other. However, on November 12, 2024, he invited her to his house in Demra to show her his studio.
After her arrival, Nobel, along with two to three unidentified men, held her hostage in a room and raped her. The disgusting act was recorded, and Noble threatened to post it on social media if she left that house, leading the victim to stay out of fear.
Then, recently, a video of Nobel with two or three accomplices dragging Israt by her hair up a flight of stairs into a room to confine her, went viral on social media. Her parents saw this video and instantly recognized their daughter, which prompted them to call the national emergency helpline 999. Then, with the assistance of the Demra Police, her parents could locate and rescue her.
So the case seems quite clear as is: a woman kidnapped, raped, and tortured for months on end, with video proof of her abuse. This constitutes a solid, provable case where the expected outcome is the rapist getting a heavy sentence due to the multiple counts of violations within this incident. However, the law system and the society in Bangladesh, even as of 2025, are not as progressive as we would like to think. Because the ultimate “remedy” to this horrifying case was marriage. Not a death sentence or life imprisonment, but marriage! What an unimaginable outcome!
The media and the court are claiming the marriage is “consensual”, as in Israt consented to this marriage. As in, when Nobel submitted the petition in court to marry her on June 18th, she was present in court that day. No official details of her supposed consent have been made public. Nobel submitted the petition following his claims that they were already married, and Magistrate Nazmin Akhter of the Dhaka Chief Metropolitan Magistrate (CMM) Court approved it.
This outcome may have been influenced by the problem of Israt not being a perfect victim, according to Bangladeshi society standards. After the news of Nobel’s arrest and his affiliation to the rape case, past images of Nobel and Israt, seemingly in a relationship, sometime between 2018 and 2024, went viral on social media. Up until then, Israt was the perfect victim to them; however, her having been in a relationship with Nobel at any point in time suddenly made her an imperfect victim, the notion being that if she had consensual relations with him in the past, somehow gave him free access to do whatever he wanted to her, including violating her. When she was no longer “flawless”, she no longer deserved the rights to any sort of protection or any sort of basic human decency. The comments left under pictures of them doing something as far from scandalous as sitting together garnered hundreds of hateful and shameful comments from netizens, accusing her of falsely accusing Nobel of rape.
The simple concept that consent can be given to a person and then revoked at any time is something far beyond their reach. Especially in a country where the mere proposition of including and recognizing marital rape in the constitution in order to criminalize it gets mocked and flagged by “religious” leaders and followers, what else can really be expected? For whatever reason, this dangerous concept that a relationship, whether marriage or dating, means that there is no need for consent is widely believed by men all over the world, not just in Bangladesh. This concept arises from the gross objectification of women and their bodies, which trivializes consent as women’s bodies begin to be seen as public entities.
Now it is no surprise that Bangladeshi society has a long way to go, but what about the legal system? The very system that was supposed to safeguard Israt instead of binding her to her abuser failed her to the greatest extent.
This is not a case of the victim having insufficient proof because Nobel himself leaked some videos of his abuse on social media, and the other acts of abuse were also recorded and can surely be retrieved. Israt also had to be physically rescued from his apartment, so sufficient proof is available for the law to have been on her side. Furthermore, Nobel has had a history of abuse, directed specifically towards women.
In May of 2023, Salsabil Mahmud, Nobel’s wife at the time, reported to police that he would abuse her, too. Nobel was brought into questioning by the police for his affiliation with a fraud case, when his wife, Salsabil, was also asked to come to the police station. That is when she lodged a verbal complaint against him at the DB office. According to her, Nobel would frequently physically abuse her under the influence, to the point where she had to call the national helpline 999 once. During that specified incident, she was then rescued by police and had to be admitted to a hospital, proving the scale of the harm he inflicted upon her.
Despite all this, the story of ‘singer’ Nobel singing and entertaining the inmates in prison during Eid holiday this year made it to newspapers in Bangladesh. How can a rapist be celebrated in this manner by the media? What does this do in terms of public perception, and how are Bangladeshi audiences accepting of this sort of media? Is the media just as complicit as the legal system? It is important to note that Nobel neither has substantial wealth nor power to really back him up; the saving grace for him is that he is a man, and that is enough here in Bangladesh.
Even with a history of violence towards women, his “punishment” decided by Bangladeshi law, was marrying the victim. Why must the perpetrator be freed while the victim receives the real punishment? Is the real crime not rape but to be born as a woman in a country where the legal system acts against women?
