DHAKA – Mohammed Suman was 17 when he slipped away to attend a political rally his country had banned. His family reported him missing within hours. Two weeks later his body surfaced from the Turag River, alongside two others who had disappeared after attending a gathering of the Awami League, the party that governed Bangladesh for sixteen years before its leader fled the country.
That death, in June, is one of 66 politically-related killings that Bangladesh’s leading rights organization has documented in the six months since Prime Minister Tarique Rahman took office in February. Ain o Salish Kendra, a rights watchdog active since 1990, counted 11 extrajudicial killings and 61 deaths in police custody across that period, according to Arab News.
The figures mark an uncomfortable reckoning for Rahman’s Bangladesh Nationalist Party, which swept to power promising to restore order and the rule of law after sixteen years of Awami League governance. They also test whether a new administration, formed from a party that spent years in opposition complaining of exactly this kind of violence, can break the cycle rather than continue it.
The violence is not restricted to government opponents. Billal Hossain Talukdar, a local BNP official, was stabbed to death during a party meeting in Dhaka on June 9. Three days later, Masudul Haque, a BNP leader in the port city of Chattogram, was shot dead in circumstances that remain unresolved. Both cases remain without an arrest.
Bangladesh as a whole has been gripped by a broader spike in reported bloodshed this year. Rights groups documented 1,238 murders between March and June alone, an average exceeding ten killings per day. Researchers acknowledge that some portion of that figure may reflect improved reporting conditions now that journalists operate with less fear of reprisal, but neither government officials nor independent monitors have provided a definitive breakdown between pre-existing crime and politically motivated killings.
Home Minister Salahuddin Ahmed, asked about the documented killings by Ain o Salish Kendra, told reporters that the overall security situation was “improving.” He offered no specific response to the 61 custody deaths his ministry’s police forces are implicated in.
The most recent public incident came on July 6, when petrol bombs were thrown at an opposition rally in Savar, a densely populated industrial district on Dhaka’s outskirts. Four activists from the National Consensus Party, a grouping that has positioned itself as a check on both the BNP and the remnants of the Awami League, were wounded. No arrests followed.
Abu Ahmed Faijul Kabir, a senior official at Ain o Salish Kendra, said the custody deaths in particular pointed to something beyond routine policing failures. “Deaths in jail and police custody appear to be rising,” he told Arab News. The organization cross-references hospital records, court filings, and news reports in compiling its figures, and said its 66-killing count excluded deaths attributed solely to criminal disputes with no traceable political dimension.
The violence unfolds against the backdrop of Sheikh Hasina’s defiant announcement last month that she intended to return to Bangladesh from Indian exile by December, despite a death sentence imposed by courts in Dhaka. Her Awami League remains formally banned, meaning any gathering of its members constitutes civil disobedience under the new government’s legal framework, and in the case of Mohammed Suman’s rally, the kind of assembly that can prove fatal.
The disappearance of Suman and his companions from that gathering drew national attention as a case study in how Bangladesh’s political transition is playing out at street level. The episode along the Turag River raised questions that investigators and courts have not definitively answered about accountability for politically motivated deaths.
BNP officials have not addressed the deaths of Awami League activists individually by name. The government has drawn a consistent distinction between prosecuting abuses from the Hasina era and what it describes as the security operations of a legitimate administration. Rights groups say the practical distinction is not visible in the data they collect.
Ain o Salish Kendra said it would publish a full mid-year assessment later this month. Whether that report will sharpen pressure on Rahman’s government, or be dismissed as advocacy aligned with the opposition, is itself a measure of how much space for independent criticism has genuinely opened in Bangladesh since the transition. What the report will not resolve is whether the killings represent the predictable disorder of a restructuring state or something more deliberate.
