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.
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.
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