Bangladesh’s former government was behind systematic attacks and killings of protesters as it tried to hold onto power last year, the UN said Wednesday, warning 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 “hundreds of extrajudicial killings”, the United Nations said.

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,” a UN 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.

– Up to 1,400 killed –

The rights office launched a fact-finding mission at the request of Bangladesh’s interim leader Mohammed Yunus, sending a team including human rights investigators, a forensics physician, and a weapons expert to the country.

Yunus welcomed the report, saying he wanted to transform “Bangladesh into a country in which all its people can live in security and dignity”.

Wednesday’s report is mainly based on more than 230 interviews with victims, witnesses, protest leaders, rights defenders, and others, reviews of medical case files, photos, videos, and other documents.

The team determined that security forces had supported Hasina’s government throughout the unrest, which began as protests against civil service job quotas and then escalated into wider calls for her to stand down.

The rights office said the former government had tried to suppress the protests with increasingly violent means.

It estimated that “as many as 1,400 people may have been killed” over 45 days, while thousands were injured.

The vast majority of those killed “were shot by Bangladesh’s security forces”, the rights office said, adding that children made up 12 to 13 percent of those killed.

https://punchng.com/un-accuses-bangladesh-of-killings-torture-widespread-abuses/