THE death of eight people at the hands of law enforcement agencies in January鈥揗arch, as the first quarterly update of 2025 on the rights situation that the rights group Odhikar made public on May 14 says, is gravely worrying. The Odhikar report lists 20 people in all having been killed extrajudicially from August 2024, when the interim government was installed after the overthrow of the authoritarian Awami League, which had been in office for about a decade and a half, in a mass uprising, and now. All this together is further worrying because the political changeover promised a sea-change in law enforcement and an end to the abuse of police power. The death of 19 people in jail custody in January鈥揗arch only adds to the concern. Of the eight people extrajudicially killed this year, one died at the hands of the police, two at the hands of the Detective Branch, one at the hands of the air force and four at the hands of the joint forces, the Odhikar report says. Two of the victims are reported to have been tortured to death, three shot dead and the remaining three beaten to death.
The interim government, keen on ensuring the rights of people with reforms in important sectors of the national life, should not allow the violation of people鈥檚 right to life. The extrajudicial killing having taken place, when the interim government is in office after a mass uprising, harks back to the Awami League era that had been marked by such events that the government in its official narratives that time tried to label with words and phrases such as 鈥榞unfight,鈥� 鈥榚ncounter,鈥� 鈥榗rossfire鈥� or even 鈥榞angland infighting.鈥� The government that time labelled such events as something in its effort to make them look less serious, but it has not ultimately helped. The joint forces during the drives in February also used the word 鈥榞unfight鈥� to describe an incident at Chand Udyan of Mohammadpur in Dhaka in which two young men, suspected of making preparations for mugging, died by the firing of a joint forces team. This suggests that the law enforcers and the drives that they conduct, singly or jointly with the security forces, have not shaken off the old practice of extrajudicial killing and the old narrative that the law enforcement agencies should by now have shunned.
The government that is working to reform law enforcement for the better should, therefore, stringently deal with issues of extrajudicial killing. It should, therefore, investigate all allegations of extrajudicial killing and hold the quarters responsible to account and take strict steps to stop the recurrence of such violation of people鈥檚 right to life.
