BNP created the Rapid Action Battalion in 2004. Under BNP, it killed over 600 people in “crossfires.” Under the Awami League, it killed hundreds more. The United States sanctioned it. BNP condemned those killings from opposition benches for fifteen years. BNP promised security sector reform. BNP returned to power in February 2026. RAB still exists. Custodial deaths in the first three months of BNP rule were documented at 39 by human rights monitors. The force BNP built, the force the world blacklisted, the force BNP condemned as AL’s instrument of murder — is still operational, still killing, still serving whoever sits in Dhaka. The sixth article in our series on whether BNP 2026 is just BAL 2.0.
There is a unit of Bangladesh’s law enforcement that has been described, in official United States government language, as responsible for “extrajudicial killings, enforced disappearances, and other serious human rights abuses.” It was created by the Bangladesh Nationalist Party in 2004. It was used extensively by the BNP government from 2004 to 2006. It was inherited and massively expanded by the Awami League from 2009 to 2024. It was sanctioned by the US Treasury Department in December 2021 under the Global Magnitsky Act. BNP, from opposition, condemned it for years as AL’s death squad.
It is called the Rapid Action Battalion. It is still operating today, under BNP’s government, with the same chain of command, the same legal immunity structures, and the same institutional culture that made it internationally notorious. What has changed is whose political opponents it is pointed at.
This is not a peripheral issue in Bangladesh’s democratic transition. The security apparatus — RAB, the Detective Branch, the police’s special units — was the instrument through which fifteen years of authoritarian politics was enforced. It was how critics were silenced, opponents disappeared, and a government that lost public legitimacy held onto power. When people demanded change in August 2024, what many of them were demanding, in part, was the end of that instrument.
What they got was a change of government. The instrument remains.
What BNP Built
The Rapid Action Battalion was established by the BNP-Jamaat coalition government in 2004, with Prime Minister Khaleda Zia’s administration presenting it as an elite counter-crime and counter-terrorism force. RAB became operational in January 2004 — its official formation order signed off by a government that included Lutfozzaman Babar as State Minister for Home Affairs, the same official later sentenced to death for his role in the August 2005 grenade attack on the Awami League rally.
From its founding, RAB operated with a specific and documented method: the “crossfire.” Suspects — or people described as suspects — were taken into RAB custody, transported to isolated locations, and shot dead. RAB’s official account invariably described these deaths as occurring during gunfights initiated by the detained person. Independent investigation by Human Rights Watch, Odhikar (Bangladesh’s oldest human rights organization), and international journalists consistently found these accounts to be fabricated. The dead men’s hands bore no gunpowder residue. Their injuries were inconsistent with the described sequences of events. Witnesses placed them in custody hours before the alleged “crossfire.” Their families were not informed of their deaths until it was too late to preserve evidence.
Between 2004 and 2006, RAB killed over 400 people in these so-called crossfires during the BNP government alone. The pattern was so consistent that “crossfire” became a byword for extrajudicial execution. Human Rights Watch documented the practice in its 2006 report Judge, Jury and Executioner: Torture and Extrajudicial Killings by Bangladesh’s Elite Security Force, which ran to 64 pages of evidence and included first-person testimony from families, eyewitnesses, and lawyers. The report found that RAB operated beyond judicial oversight, with impunity effectively guaranteed by the political support of the government that created it.
By the time BNP’s government ended with the military-backed caretaker administration in January 2007, RAB had accumulated a death toll that no democratic government should have been able to defend. BNP’s government defended it anyway — right up until the day it left office.
The Numbers Under AL: Worse, And More Documented
The Awami League, returning to power in 2009, did not dismantle RAB. It institutionalized it. Under fifteen years of AL rule, RAB’s documented extrajudicial killings exceeded 600 — and that is the figure from the incomplete record available to human rights monitors who operated under systematic obstruction. Odhikar documented 600+ killings across that period before its own operations were effectively shut down by the government in 2023.
The AL era also added a new dimension to Bangladesh’s security state: enforced disappearances. The existence of “Aynaghar” — a secret detention facility operated by the Directorate General of Forces Intelligence (DGFI), Bangladesh’s military intelligence — was first reported seriously in 2017. Former detainees, speaking to journalists at enormous personal risk, described a network of cells beneath a military compound where people were held without charge, without access to lawyers, without acknowledgment of their detention. Families who asked about missing relatives were told nothing. Legal avenues led nowhere because the detentions did not officially exist.
The number of people held in Aynaghar over the AL period is not known with certainty. What is known is that human rights organizations including Human Rights Watch confirmed its existence based on corroborating testimony from multiple former detainees, and that some of those who emerged from it described torture consistent across multiple independent accounts.
Odhikar documented 708 enforced disappearances between 2009 and 2023. Of those, 88 people eventually reappeared — released or otherwise surfacing. 76 were found dead. The remainder are still missing.
The United States responded in December 2021 with sanctions under the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act. The US Treasury Department designated RAB and six of its current and former officials — including Inspector General of Police Benazir Ahmed and RAB Director-General Chowdhury Abdullah Al-Mamun — for “serious human rights abuses.” The accompanying statement from the Treasury was unambiguous: RAB had committed extrajudicial killings and enforced disappearances. The US government was putting its legal and financial authority behind that finding.
BNP responded to the sanctions announcement from opposition with expressions of satisfaction. The sanctions were, BNP said, proof of what the party had been saying for years: RAB was AL’s private death squad, and the international community had finally recognized it. BNP’s leadership implied, in multiple public statements, that a change of government would bring accountability and reform.
What BNP Said
The record of BNP’s opposition-era statements on security sector reform is extensive and specific. These were not vague aspirational commitments. They were concrete positions, stated repeatedly, across multiple years, in multiple forums.
In 2021, following the US sanctions announcement, BNP Secretary General Mirza Fakhrul Islam Alamgir called the designations “fully justified” and stated that the sanctions demonstrated that RAB had become “an instrument of political suppression.” BNP’s statement explicitly connected RAB’s abuses to the AL government and called for “accountability for all extrajudicial killings.”
In 2022, BNP’s international affairs committee submitted materials to foreign embassies and international organizations documenting RAB’s killings under the AL government and calling for sustained international pressure. The materials named specific victims, cited Odhikar data, and referenced the US Treasury sanctions. The implicit and at times explicit argument was that the killings were a product of AL governance and would end if AL was replaced.
Tarique Rahman, in interviews and statements from London, spoke of the need for security sector reform as a core element of BNP’s governance agenda. In at least three recorded statements between 2022 and 2024, he used the word “accountability” in connection with RAB and the security apparatus. He described RAB’s killings as crimes against the Bangladeshi people — crimes committed, in his framing, by the AL government.
He did not mention that his party created the institution.
What Happened After August 2024
The interim government that took office following the August 2024 uprising moved quickly on some institutional changes — but the security apparatus was not among them. RAB remained operational from day one of the new administration. Its organizational structure was unchanged. Its personnel — including many who had served through the documented AL-era killings — remained in their posts. The sanctioned officials had been relieved of their positions before the transition, but the institution they ran continued without structural reform.
In the months following August 2024, as the interim government focused on managing the transition and beginning the process of accountability for AL-era abuses, reports emerged of a different problem: the security apparatus was now being directed against AL supporters, perceived AL affiliates, and in some documented cases, people with no political affiliation at all who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Human Rights Watch’s World Report 2026, covering the August-to-December 2024 period and early 2025, noted that while the AI and UN had welcomed the fall of the AL government, they also expressed serious concern about “reports of extrajudicial killings and mob violence in the immediate aftermath” of the transition, and about subsequent “abuses by security forces” during what the report described as a period of “widespread human rights violations.”
The Human Rights Support Society — HRSS, one of Bangladesh’s independent human rights monitors — documented what happened next. In the period from BNP’s return to formal governmental authority in February 2026 through the end of April 2026, HRSS recorded 39 custodial deaths. In three months. The previous article in this series cited this figure in passing; it deserves to stand alone.
Thirty-nine people died in state custody in three months.
In the Awami League era, each custody death was a documented data point in BNP’s case against the government. Human rights organizations like Odhikar were celebrated by BNP for producing exactly this kind of accounting. The numbers were used to demonstrate that the AL government operated outside the law, that its security forces killed with impunity, that the absence of accountability was itself an indictment of the government.
The same standard applies now. By BNP’s own reasoning, 39 custody deaths in three months is evidence of a government operating outside the law.
The Aynaghar Question
Among the most consequential commitments made during Bangladesh’s post-August 2024 transition was the promise of accountability for Aynaghar — the secret DGFI detention facility where hundreds of people were held without legal process during the AL era.
Former detainees came forward. Families of the disappeared sought justice. Human rights organizations that had documented the facility for years anticipated that its operators would face legal consequences now that the government that ran it was gone. A commission was established. Testimony was taken. Names were named.
The results, as of mid-2026, have been deeply incomplete. Some former Aynaghar operators have faced preliminary proceedings. No convictions have been secured. The commission investigating the facility has operated with limited resources and limited access. Families of the still-missing — those 76 who emerged dead, those hundreds who have not emerged at all — report that they received little information about what happened to their relatives.
There is a specific dimension of the Aynaghar accountability question that connects to BNP’s current governance. The DGFI — the military intelligence directorate that ran Aynaghar — is a permanent institution. Its personnel overlap substantially with the broader security apparatus. A genuine commitment to ending the practice of secret detention would require structural reform of that institution: new oversight mechanisms, accountability for past operators, systematic exposure of what happened.
What has instead occurred is a partial process that has created the appearance of accountability without the substance. The institution that ran Aynaghar remains intact. Its new officers have been briefed on the old officers’ methods. Its relationship to the executive government has not been restructured. The only change is that the current government has no political reason to run a secret detention facility for the people it was running it for before.
It does, however, have the facility. And the institution. And the precedent.
The Personnel Problem
In the immediate aftermath of August 2024, there was significant public pressure for accountability within the security forces — not just for institutional reform, but for individual accountability for the police and RAB officers who had been responsible for the deaths of protesters during the July-August uprising and for AL-era killings more broadly.
What occurred was a selective process. Some officers were suspended. Some were transferred. Cases were filed against officers specifically identified by video evidence from the July-August protest period. But the broader accountability question — the 600+ RAB crossfire deaths, the documented enforced disappearances, the torture at Aynaghar — was handled through the commission process rather than through criminal prosecutions.
The result is that a substantial portion of the security apparatus personnel who served through the AL period remain in service. Some have been promoted. The officer corps of RAB, the Detective Branch, and the major police units includes people who were operational during the documented period of extrajudicial killings. They have not been prosecuted. They have not been formally held accountable. They have, in many cases, simply continued their careers under new political management.
This is not an accusation that every individual officer committed crimes. It is an observation about institutional culture. When the personnel who carried out extrajudicial killings under one government are retained and promoted under the next government — without accountability, without acknowledgment, without any signal that the institution’s practices have changed — the institution’s culture does not change. The practices that were normalized before remain normalized. What changes is who authorizes them and against whom they are directed.
Bangladesh has seen this cycle before. In 2001, when BNP took power from AL, it inherited the same security apparatus and used it to kill 44 people in Operation Clean Heart and to disappear hundreds. In 2009, when AL took power from BNP, it inherited the same apparatus — including RAB — and used it to disappear 708 people. In 2026, BNP has inherited the same apparatus again.
The apparatus does not change with elections. It serves power.
The US Sanctions: What Happened to Them
The December 2021 US Treasury sanctions on RAB and six of its officials were described at the time as a landmark intervention — a direct statement from Bangladesh’s largest bilateral development partner that it would not tolerate the normalization of extrajudicial killing. The sanctions were welcomed by BNP. They were also, BNP implied, a demonstration of how seriously the international community took AL’s abuses.
With BNP in power in 2026, the status of those sanctions is an important question. Sanctions of this kind can be lifted when the sanctioned entity undergoes genuine reform. They are not automatically lifted with a change of government. The conditions for lifting them — accountability for past abuses, structural reforms to prevent future ones, demonstrated change in institutional behavior — require active effort and verification.
As of May 2026, the US sanctions on RAB and its former officials remain in place. No application for delisting has been publicly announced. No US government statement has indicated that the reform conditions have been met. RAB’s senior leadership is aware of this: operating under the shadow of US Treasury designations constrains the institution’s international relationships, its ability to receive foreign training and equipment, and its formal interactions with allied security services.
What this means in practice is that BNP is governing with a security force that its most important international partner has formally designated as a human rights violator — and that BNP has done nothing substantive to change the conditions that produced that designation.
The party that welcomed the sanctions in 2021 as vindication has apparently decided that the sanctions are an inconvenience now that the institution they targeted is BNP’s own instrument of governance.
BNP’s Own Standard
The force of the argument here comes not from any outside standard but from BNP’s own. The party spent fifteen years building an international case against RAB. It documented the killings. It shared the data. It cited the US sanctions. It invoked the names of the dead.
In doing so, BNP established what the evidence standard for condemning a government’s security practices should look like. It looks like this: documented custody deaths, unaccountable institutions, personnel who committed abuses and were not held responsible, a security apparatus that serves political purposes rather than legal ones.
By that standard — BNP’s own standard — the evidence compiled in the first three months of BNP’s government raises serious concerns. Thirty-nine custody deaths. A sanctioned force still operational. An Aynaghar accountability process that has produced no convictions. A security apparatus whose personnel include officers who served through fifteen years of documented abuses without facing consequences.
This is not a verdict. It is a direction. In April 2026, it is still early. The full shape of BNP’s security governance will only be visible over months and years. The institutions that produce extrajudicial killings do not do so uniformly in every period — they do so when the political incentives align and the constraints are absent.
What is visible right now is the absence of constraints. RAB has not been reformed. The Aynaghar accountability process has not produced justice. The personnel problem has not been addressed. The structural conditions that allowed 600+ crossfire deaths under AL, and over 400 under BNP’s own first government, are intact.
BNP told Bangladesh that it knew what those conditions produced. BNP built its entire opposition identity on that knowledge. The question Bangladesh must now ask — and ask loudly, while the window for accountability is still open — is whether BNP is governing as if it still believes what it said.
The Pattern Holds
Six articles into this series, the finding remains consistent. Bangladesh Untold has documented how BNP in 2026 has replicated patterns it condemned in opposition: authoritarianism in its first 100 days, press freedom crackdowns, institutional capture, political persecution of opponents, dismantling of judicial independence. The security apparatus is the oldest entry on that list and the most foundational.
The security state is not a consequence of authoritarianism. It is its precondition. You cannot silence critics without police who will arrest them. You cannot disappear opponents without a facility to hold them. You cannot sustain mass political prosecution without investigators who will produce cases on demand. The security apparatus is the physical infrastructure of the Bangladesh that BNP built in 2001-2006, that AL maintained and expanded from 2009-2024, and that neither party has shown meaningful willingness to restructure.
RAB is still operational. The Aynaghar operators have not been convicted. The personnel remain in service. The sanctions are unaddressed. The custody deaths are being counted.
BNP created this institution. BNP condemned it. BNP inherited it again.
The guns never changed sides. They just found new targets.
Bangladesh Untold is a source-backed documentation project covering Bangladesh’s modern political history. All claims in this article are drawn from verified reports by Human Rights Watch (World Report 2026, Judge Jury and Executioner 2006), Odhikar, the Human Rights Support Society (HRSS), the US Treasury Department (December 2021 Global Magnitsky sanctions), Amnesty International, the Daily Star, Netra News, and official statements by BNP leadership from 2021–2024. This is the sixth article in Series 9: BNP 2026 = BAL 2.0?