UN fact-finding report says Hasina ordered to kill protesters, hide bodies

Staff Reporter:
Deposed Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina had ordered security forces to kill protesters of the July up-spring and hide their bodies to quell the protests, according to the Fact-Finding Report of the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR).
The Fact-Finding Report titled ‘Human Rights Violations and Abuses related to the Protests of July and August 2024 in Bangladesh’ was released yesterday.
The report shows that on the evening of 18 July in 2024, the then Home Affairs Minister chaired a meeting of the ‘Core Committee’, 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, according to the report.
“Senior official testimony also indicated that, in a meeting held the next day, the (then) Prime Minister herself told security force officials to kill protesters to quell the protests and specifically demanded to ‘arrest the ringleaders of the protests, the troublemakers, kill them and hide their bod-ies’,” the report read.
The report, which acknowledged the cooperation of Bangladesh authorities with its investigators, notes: “Following the fall of the previous Government, the current Interim Government has com-menced efforts to ensure accountability for serious human rights violations and abuses. Among its steps, it has brought cases against senior officials before Bangladesh’s International Crimes Tribu-nal (ICT), as well as in the regular courts.”
These efforts have been hampered, to differing degrees, by preexisting structural deficiencies of the law enforcement and justice sectors, established police malpractices such as bringing meritless charges based on mass cases, continued intimidation and evidence tampering by some security of-ficials who face allegations but remain in their positions, as well as other due process concerns re-lated to ICT and regular courts, according to the report.
The interim government in a statement yesterday thanks the UN’s Office of OHCHR for undertak-ing the most thorough independent investigation to date of the events in Bangladesh in July and August that ended the Hasina regime.