Former Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s government was behind possible “crimes against humanity” as it strived to hold on to power last year, says the United Nations.
Before Hasina was toppled in a mainly student-led revolution last August, her government oversaw a systematic crackdown on protesters, involving “hundreds of extrajudicial killings”, the UN human rights office said in a fact-finding report on Wednesday.
Publishing findings of its inquiry into events in Bangladesh between July 1 and August 15 last year, the UN rights office said it had “reasonable grounds to believe that the crimes against humanity of murder, torture, imprisonment and infliction of other inhumane acts have taken place”.
These alleged crimes committed by the government, along with violent elements of her Awami League party and the Bangladeshi security and intelligence services, were part of “a widespread and systematic attack against protesters and other civilians … in furtherance of the former government’s [bid] to ensure its continuation in power”, the report says.
Hasina, 77, who fled into exile to neighbouring India, has already defied an arrest warrant to face trial in Bangladesh for crimes against humanity.
Up to 1,400 killed in 45 days
The UN team found that Bangladesh’s security forces had supported Hasina’s government throughout the unrest, which began as protests against civil service job quotas and then escalated into calls for her to stand down.
The rights office said the Hasina government tried systematically to suppress the protests with increasingly violent means. It estimated that “as many as 1,400 people may have been killed” in those 45 days while thousands were injured.
The vast majority of those killed “were shot by Bangladesh’s security forces”, the rights office said, adding 12 to 13 percent of those killed were minors.
The overall death toll projection in the UN report is far higher than the most recent estimate by Bangladesh’s interim government of 834.
“The brutal response was a calculated and well-coordinated strategy by the former government to hold onto power in the face of mass opposition,” UN rights chief Volker Turk said in a statement.
“There are reasonable grounds to believe hundreds of extrajudicial killings, extensive arbitrary arrests and detentions, and torture, were carried out with the knowledge, coordination and direction of the political leadership and senior security officials as part of a strategy to suppress the protests.”
The UN office launched its fact-finding mission at the request of Bangladesh’s interim leader Mohammed Yunus, sending a team including human rights investigators, a forensic physician and a weapons expert to the country.
Wednesday’s report is primarily based on more than 230 confidential in-depth interviews conducted in Bangladesh, including online, with victims, witnesses, protest leaders, rights defenders and others, as well as reviews of medical case files, photos, videos and other documents.
“Accountability and justice are essential for national healing and for the future of Bangladesh,” Turk said, stressing that “the best way forward for Bangladesh is to face the horrific wrongs committed” during the period in question.
What was needed, he said, was “a comprehensive process of truth-telling, healing and accountability, and to redress the legacy of serious human rights violations and ensure they can never happen again”.
Dozen died in detention: Rights group
Meanwhile, Bangladesh’s leading rights group Odhikar said in a report on Wednesday at least a dozen people died in detention since last year’s revolution, including by torture and gunshot wounds.
“The interim government should not let these crimes go unpunished,” Odhikar director ASM Nasiruddin Elan told the AFP news agency. “Those involved in extrajudicial killings must be brought to justice.”
Odhikar detailed how security forces, during Hasina’s 15-year rule, engaged in widespread killings to bolster her power – and accused the same agencies of continuing to commit human rights violations since she fled.
Since she left, Bangladeshi security forces have carried out sweeping arrests against supporters of the Awami League party and loyalists of what they dub her “fascist” ex-government.
Odhikar detailed 12 deaths that took place between August 9 and December 31, 2024.
Three of them were in police custody, and the others were under the control of other security units, including the armed forces and much-feared paramilitary Rapid Action Battalion (RAB).
At least seven victims died after torture, and four had gunshot wounds, according to Odhikar. Another person was beaten and later pushed off a bridge by the police, it added.
Bangladesh’s security forces are “investigating all the cases”, Sami-Ud-Dowla Chowdhury, the armed forces’ public relations director, told AFP.
Police spokesman Inamul Haque Sagar said officers had been ordered to “refrain from activities beyond their jurisdiction”.
“Even the friends of the fascist regime have a right to justice,” Odhikar’s Elan said. “Extrajudicial killings must be prevented at any cost.”