GENEVA: Bangladesh’s former government was behind systematic attacks and killings of protesters as it tried to hold onto power last year, the UN said on Wednesday, warning that the abuses could amount to “crimes against humanity”.
Before prime minister Sheikh Hasina was toppled in a student-led revolution last August, her government cracked down on protesters and others, including by “hundreds of extrajudicial killings”, the United Nations said.
The UN rights office (OHCHR) 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 Hasina’s Awami League party and the Bangladeshi security and intelligence services, were part of “a widespread and systematic attack against protesters and other civilians”, OHCHR’s report into the violence said.
Hasina, 77, who fled into exile in neighbouring India, has already defied an arrest warrant to face trial in Bangladesh for crimes against humanity.
Asked about Hasina’s personal culpability, UN rights chief Volker Turk told reporters that his office “found reasonable grounds to believe that indeed the top echelons of the previous government were aware, and in fact were involved in... very serious violations”.
OHCHR estimated that “as many as 1,400 people may have been killed” over the 45-day period, the vast majority of them “shot by Bangladesh’s security forces”.
Children made up 12 to 13 percent of those killed, it said.
The overall death toll given is far higher than the most recent estimate by Bangladesh’s interim government of 834 people killed.