The ousted prime minister and Awami League president, Sheikh Hasina, herself ordered security forces to kill protesters and hide their bodies to quell the student-led protests in July 2024 in Bangladesh, according to a report by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.
The report, released from Geneva on Wednesday, said that the government of Sheikh Hasina and security and intelligence services, alongside violent elements associated with the Awami League, systematically engaged in a range of serious human rights violations during the student-led protests.
鈥極n the evening of 18 July, the then home affairs minister chaired a meeting of the 鈥淐ore Committee,鈥� attended by the heads of Police, RAB and BGB and intelligence leaders. At the meeting, the minister told the BGB commander, in front of the other senior security sector leaders, to order use of lethal force much more readily, as one of the meeting participants related to OHCHR,鈥� it said.
鈥楽enior official testimony also indicated that, in a meeting held the next day, the Prime Minister herself told security force officials to kill protesters to quell the protests and specifically demanded to 鈥渁rrest the ringleaders of the protests, the troublemakers, kill them and hide their bodies鈥�, it added.聽
鈥楾his testimony is also consistent with Awami League General Secretary and then government minister Obaidul Quader telling reporters on July 19 that security forces had been given orders to 鈥渟hoot on sight,鈥� an instruction manifestly incompatible with international human rights standards,鈥� it said.
To remain in power, the Hasina government tried systematically to suppress these protests with increasingly violent means, the investigation also revealed.
鈥楾he brutal response was a calculated and well-coordinated strategy by the former government to hold onto power in the face of mass opposition,鈥� said UN Human Rights chief Volker Turk in a statement on the occasion.
鈥楾here 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,鈥� he added.
Meanwhile, the Professor Muhammad Yunus-led interim government has welcomed the report and thanked the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights for undertaking an independent investigation into the rights violations and abuses during the July-August student-led mass uprising that ousted the authoritarian regime of Sheikh Hasina, who fled to India for shelter on August 5, 2024.
The UN report recommended disbanding the Rapid Action Battalion and return personnel not involved in serious violations to their home units and confining the functions of the Border Guards Bangladesh to border control issues and the Directorate General of Forces Intelligence to military intelligence and limit and delineate their resources and legal powers accordingly.
It also suggested demilitarising control over the Ansar/VDP to the extent that they assume law enforcement support tasks.
Responding to a question at a hybrid press conference, Rory Mungoven, the chief of the Asia-Pacific Section of the UN Human Rights Office, said that they had found the use of military rifles in 66 per cent cases of deaths, shotguns with pellets in 12 per cent, pistols 2 in per cent and others in 20 per cent cases, while referring to a Dhaka Medical College forensic department examinations of 130 cases of deaths as mentioned in the report.
Regarding the UN support in bringing to justice Hasina and others who fled the country after the July uprising to ensure justice, he said that the UN, like many countries, had reservations about the trial process leading to the death penalty and it needed to be seen from a broader perspective.
And Bangladesh should reconsider the death penalty, he added.
Drawing on the testimony of senior officials and other evidence, the UN Human Rights Office probe also found an official policy to attack and violently repress anti-government protesters and sympathisers, raising concerns as to crimes against humanity requiring urgent further criminal investigation.
It found patterns of security forces deliberately and impermissibly killing or maiming protesters, including incidents where people were shot at point-blank range.
Based on deaths reported by various credible sources, the report estimates that as many as 1,400 people may have been killed between July 1 and August 15, and thousands were injured, the vast majority of whom were shot by Bangladesh鈥檚 security forces, said the report.聽
Of these, the report indicates that as many as 12 or 13 per cent of those killed were children. Bangladesh Police reported that 44 of its officers were killed, it mentioned.
The protests were triggered by the High Court鈥檚 decision to reinstate a quota system in public service jobs but were rooted in much broader grievances arising from destructive and corrupt politics and governance that had entrenched economic inequalities, said the report.
At the request of the interim government chief adviser, Mohammed Yunus, the UN Human Rights Office in September dispatched a team to Bangladesh, including human rights investigators, a forensics physician and a weapons expert, to conduct an independent and impartial fact-finding into the alleged human rights violations that took place in Bangladesh between July 1 and August 15 in 2024.
Former senior officials directly involved in handling the protests and other inside sources described how ousted prime minister Sheikh Hasina and other senior officials directed and oversaw a series of large-scale operations, in which security and intelligence forces shot and killed protesters or arbitrarily arrested and tortured them, the report mentioned.
The report examined in detail the emblematic case of Abu Sayed, among others, who was filmed shouting 鈥榮hoot me鈥� at police with his arms spread wide apart at a protest at Begum Rokeya University in Rangpur.
There are reasonable grounds to believe that Abu Sayed was the victim of a deliberate extrajudicial killing by the police, the report said.
Having been at the forefront of the early protests, women, including protest leaders, were also subjected to arbitrary arrests, torture and ill-treatment and attacks by security forces and Awami League supporters.
The report documented gender-based violence, including physical assaults and threats of rape, aiming at deterring women from participating in protests.
The investigation also found police and other security forces killed and maimed children, and subjected them to arbitrary arrest, detention in inhumane conditions and torture.
Also among those killed were very young children who were brought by their parents to protests, or who were shot as bystanders. 聽
On August 5鈥� the final and one of the deadliest days of the protests 鈥� a 12-year-old boy who was shot by the police in Azampur recalled that police were 鈥榝iring everywhere like rainfall鈥�.
It also documented troubling instances of retaliatory killings and other serious revenge violence targeting Awami League officials and supporters, police and media, as the Hasina government started to lose control of the country.聽
鈥楬indus, Ahmadiyya Muslims and indigenous people from the Chittagong Hill Tracts were also subjected to human rights abuses. While some 100 arrests in relation to attacks on distinct religious and indigenous groups have reportedly been made, the perpetrators of many other acts of revenge violence and attacks on such groups still enjoy impunity,鈥� the report said.
The 114-page report provides a detailed set of recommendations to reform the security and justice sectors, abolish a host of repressive laws and institutions designed to stifle civic and political dissent and implement broader changes to the political system and economic governance.
