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She survived the initial blast. That made it worse.

On the afternoon of August 21, 2004, thirteen grenades were thrown into a crowd of thousands at the Awami League’s central office in Dhaka. Sixteen people died on the spot. Their deaths were immediate — final, at least, in that sense. The shrapnel did not wait.

Ivy Rahman was not that lucky.

She was the Awami League’s Women’s Affairs Secretary. She was 58 years old. She was standing near the stage when the grenades hit. She took serious shrapnel wounds to the body. She was rushed to hospital. She held on for seventy-two hours — three days — before she died on the morning of August 24, 2004.

Those seventy-two hours matter. Not because they were unusual in a country where hospitals are crowded and victims sometimes linger. But because of what happened during them.

While Ivy Rahman was fighting for her life in that hospital bed, the government of Bangladesh — the same government whose ministers would later be convicted of ordering the attack — was busy destroying the evidence that might have held them accountable.

Who She Was

Jebun Nahar Ivy. That was her full name. She went by Ivy — Ivy Rahman after her marriage to Zillur Rahman, a senior Awami League leader who would later become the President of Bangladesh.

She had spent decades in the Awami League’s women’s wing. Not as a figurehead. Not as a placeholder name on a committee. As a working politician who showed up, organized, spoke, and fought. By 2004 she had risen to serve as the party’s Women’s Affairs Secretary — one of the most senior positions a woman could hold in Bangladeshi party politics at the time.

On August 21 she was there for a reason: the Awami League was holding a rally at 23 Bangabandhu Avenue to protest a string of bomb attacks targeting Awami League leaders across the country. It was meant to be a show of defiance. A public statement that the opposition would not be silenced by fear.

What happened instead became the single deadliest political attack in Bangladesh’s history.

5:22 PM, August 21, 2004

Sheikh Hasina had just finished speaking. The crowd was dense — thousands of people packed into the street in front of the party office. It was an ordinary Saturday afternoon in Dhaka.

Then the grenades started landing.

Thirteen grenades in total. Thrown from rooftop positions by a twelve-man attack team. Military-grade Arges grenades — the kind used in wars, not available in any civilian market in Bangladesh. Each one was designed to kill.

The blasts tore through the crowd in seconds. Sixteen people died where they stood. Sheikh Hasina’s bodyguard, Mahbubur Rahman, positioned himself between the explosion and his principal. He absorbed the shrapnel. He died. Hasina survived — but with permanent hearing damage she carries to this day.

Over five hundred people were injured. Dozens critically.

Ivy Rahman was among them. She had been close to the stage. The shrapnel found her.

While She Was Still Alive: The Cover-Up Begins

Here is the part of this story that demands to be said plainly:

Ivy Rahman did not die immediately. She spent three days in hospital. And during those three days, the Bangladesh government — led by Prime Minister Khaleda Zia, whose son Tarique Rahman would later be convicted of planning the attack — did not investigate. They destroyed.

The crime scene was washed with water and detergent.

Hours after the attack. While the injured were still in surgery. While people like Ivy Rahman were in intensive care. Government-directed personnel washed 23 Bangabandhu Avenue, removing blood, removing fragments, removing any forensic evidence that might point to who had done this and who had helped them.

Grenades that were recovered intact — four of the thirteen did not detonate — were deliberately destroyed rather than preserved as evidence. The Supreme Court Bar Association later called this exactly what it was: systematic destruction of evidence. A cover-up operation conducted by the state.

Police refused to register any criminal case.

The Awami League filed cases. Police refused to accept them. They accepted a general diary entry — the most minimal possible procedural acknowledgment, equivalent to recording that something happened without committing to investigate what. The message from the BNP government was unambiguous: this case will not be investigated on your terms.

No minister visited the hospitals.

Not one BNP minister went to see the injured in those first days. Not to express condolences. Not to demonstrate the government’s concern for victims of political violence on its watch. Nothing. The ruling party treated the aftermath of the deadliest political attack in Bangladesh’s history as a problem to be managed, not a tragedy to be acknowledged.

Ivy Rahman died on August 24. She died while all of this was happening around her.

The Fabrication: “Joj Mia Did It”

With the crime scene sanitized and the real investigation blocked, the BNP government needed a story. So they invented one.

The Crime Investigation Department — under a government that had already signaled its intentions by washing away the evidence — produced a theory: the attack had been carried out by Joj Mia (also known as Jamal Ahmed), a petty criminal from Noakhali, along with fourteen members of a gang called the Seven Star Group led by someone named Subrata Bain. They had allegedly met in Moghbazar and rehearsed on a remote island before the attack.

On June 10, 2005 — nearly a year after Ivy Rahman’s death — Joj Mia was arrested from his home. On June 26, under what investigators would later document as torture in custody, he gave a confessional statement under Section 164 implicating the Seven Star Group.

The story had one problem: it was entirely false.

Shaibal Saha Partha, another person arrested and implicated by the same investigation, was also tortured into giving a false confessional statement. He was eventually released. He still carries the psychological damage from his time in custody — arrested for a crime he had nothing to do with, tortured by a state apparatus that needed a scapegoat.

Simultaneously, the government commissioned a one-man judicial probe. Justice Joynal Abedin was appointed to investigate. His commission produced a report blaming the attack on unnamed “foreign and local enemies.” It named no planners. It identified no chain of command. It reached no conclusions that could lead to any prosecution of anyone who actually mattered.

Two years later, Justice Joynal Abedin was elevated to the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court.

The Daily Star later called his elevation a “shame” for the judiciary of Bangladesh. That is a precise description.

The Truth That Emerged After 1/11

The BNP government fell on January 11, 2007 — a military-backed caretaker government took power in what became known as 1/11. A new CID investigation was ordered. This time, investigators were not operating under the oversight of the people who had ordered the attack.

In November 2007, Mufti Abdul Hannan — the chief of Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami (HuJI), who had been arrested by the BNP government in 2005 but deliberately never linked to the August 21 case — made his confession. He described in detail how the attack had been organized. He named names.

The planning meetings had taken place at Hawa Bhaban — the Gulshan office from which Tarique Rahman, Khaleda Zia’s son and the de facto power center of the BNP government, ran what was effectively a parallel government. Mufti Hannan identified Lutfozzaman Babar, then State Minister for Home Affairs, as having provided the government and security apparatus backing that made the attack possible. He identified Abdus Salam Pintu, Deputy Minister for Education, whose brother Maulana Tajuddin was the key liaison between BNP and HuJI.

He named Harris Chowdhury, Khaleda Zia’s political secretary. He named senior officials of the Home Ministry, police, the Directorate General of Forces Intelligence (DGFI), and National Security Intelligence (NSI).

And he named Tarique Rahman.

The grenades themselves — military-grade Arges grenades, war weapons — had come from Pakistan through a chain involving Tehrik-e-Jihad Islami operatives. They were not available in Bangladeshi markets. They were military ordnance that had been moved through channels that required state complicity to function.

Ivy Rahman was killed with a military weapon that traveled from Pakistan to Dhaka specifically to kill the Awami League leadership at that rally.

The 2018 Verdict: 49 Convicted, 19 Sentenced to Death

On October 10, 2018 — fourteen years after the attack, fourteen years after Ivy Rahman’s death — the Speedy Trial Tribunal-1 in Dhaka delivered its verdict. Judge Shahed Nuruddin’s finding was unambiguous:

“The attack was a well-orchestrated plan, executed through abuse of state power.”

Nineteen people were sentenced to death. They included Lutfozzaman Babar, former State Minister for Home Affairs. They included Abdus Salam Pintu, former Deputy Minister for Education. They included Brigadier General (Retd) Abdur Rahim, former Director General of National Security Intelligence. They included Brigadier General (Retd) Rezzaqul Haider Chowdhury, former Director General of DGFI. They included Maulana Tajuddin, the man who linked the politicians to the killers.

Nineteen more were sentenced to life imprisonment. That list included Tarique Rahman — BNP acting chairman, son of Khaleda Zia, the man convicted of planning the attack that killed Ivy Rahman and twenty-three others. Harris Chowdhury, Khaleda Zia’s political secretary, was sentenced to life. So were several BNP lawmakers who had facilitated meetings between the party leadership and HuJI operatives.

Former Inspector Generals of Police — Ashraful Huda and Shahudul Haque — were sentenced to two years each for harbouring offenders. The officers who had fabricated the “Joj Mia” story, the policemen who had misled the investigation, received four and two-year sentences respectively.

All 38 people sentenced to death or life imprisonment were also found guilty of grievously injuring the attack’s victims and given additional twenty-year sentences to run concurrently.

Ivy Rahman’s death was acknowledged in court. The grenade attack that took her life three days after it reached her body was proven, beyond reasonable doubt, to have been ordered by the ruling government of Bangladesh at the time.

Her husband Zillur Rahman had become President of Bangladesh in 2009. He died in office in 2013. He never saw a final justice delivered for his wife’s killing.

December 2024: All 49 Walk Free

In July 2024, the student-led uprising ousted the Awami League government. By August, the political landscape of Bangladesh had been transformed. By late 2024, the judiciary was being reconstituted under the new political order.

In December 2024, a reconstituted High Court acquitted all 49 individuals convicted in the August 21 case. All of them. Including Tarique Rahman. Including Lutfozzaman Babar, who had been sentenced to death. Including every police officer and intelligence official who had been found guilty of faciliting the massacre or covering it up afterward.

In September 2025, the Supreme Court of Bangladesh upheld the acquittal.

Forty-nine convictions, established over fourteen years of investigation and trial, with confessional statements and documentary evidence and witness testimony — all of it annulled. The reasoning of the courts was not examined in public detail. The process moved quickly. The outcome was complete.

Tarique Rahman is now the Prime Minister of Bangladesh.

What This Means for Ivy Rahman

There is a particular cruelty in the arc of this story.

Ivy Rahman spent her life in politics. She understood that politics in Bangladesh was dangerous work. She was standing at a rally to protest political violence when political violence found her. She survived the initial blast. She held on for three days — long enough, perhaps, for some part of her to understand what was happening in the world outside her hospital room.

And now, twenty-two years after her death, the man convicted of ordering the grenades that killed her is the head of government of Bangladesh. The men convicted of supplying state resources to make the attack possible have been acquitted. The cover-up that was conducted while she lay dying — the washing of the crime scene, the destruction of evidence, the fabrication of the “Joj Mia” narrative — has been rendered moot by the erasure of every conviction it was designed to prevent.

The one-man commission that produced a report clearing the actual perpetrators. The justice who wrote that report and was rewarded with a Supreme Court elevation. The pattern that ran through every phase of the aftermath: protect the principals, sacrifice the expendable, make the evidence disappear.

That pattern won.

The Numbers That Should Not Fade

Twenty-four people died in the August 21, 2004 grenade attack.

More than five hundred were injured — some permanently disabled, some carrying shrapnel in their bodies to this day.

Sheikh Hasina suffered permanent hearing damage that has never fully healed.

Ivy Rahman survived seventy-two hours and then died. She was fifty-eight years old. She had spent decades in the service of the Awami League and the women’s movement within it. She had a husband who loved her and would go on to lead the country she helped build — but not with her beside him.

The grenades that killed her were military weapons. They required state connections to procure. They were thrown by men who had been recruited, organized, and equipped with the knowledge and backing of people operating from the ruling party’s power center.

This was not a random act of political violence. It was an assassination operation conducted by the government of Bangladesh against the opposition. Twenty-four people died. One of them was Ivy Rahman.

She held on for three days.

Bangladesh should remember those three days. And remember what was done during them — and after them — by the people who ordered her killing, and by the system that ultimately let them go.

This article is part of Series 4: The Victims — profiles of the people killed, injured, and erased in the course of Bangladesh’s documented history of political violence from 2001–2006. Sources include the 2018 verdict of Speedy Trial Tribunal-1 (Case No. 01/2008), CID investigation records, Dhaka Tribune, The Daily Star, and bdnews24 contemporaneous reporting.

The Crossfire Widows: Who Cleans Up After Bangladesh’s Death Squad?

The phone call came at two in the morning.

A voice she didn’t recognise told her that her husband had been shot. That he’d tried to escape. That he’d opened fire first. That there was nothing anyone could have done.

It was the same script they used every time.

Somewhere in Bangladesh, a woman just became the “crossfire widow.” She now has no income, no legal recourse, no body to bury properly, and a story she can never safely tell in public. Her children will grow up knowing their father was killed by the state — and that the state will never answer for it.

This is what 600+ extrajudicial killings actually looks like. Not a statistic. A phone call at two in the morning. Every single time.

What RAB Was Built To Do

The Rapid Action Battalion — RAB — was created in 2004 under the BNP government of Khaleda Zia. It came two years after Operation Clean Heart, a military crackdown that killed 44 people in custody and resulted in an indemnity law so egregious that Bangladesh’s own Supreme Court later struck it down.

The official line: RAB was an elite anti-crime force. Multi-agency. Professional. A step forward for law enforcement in a country that desperately needed capable institutions.

The reality: RAB became the most feared killing machine in Bangladesh’s post-independence history. Not because it operated in secret, but because it operated in the open — and nothing happened to it.

By October 2006, less than three years after its formation, RAB had killed 367 people. Human Rights Watch compiled the database. The youngest victim was 14 years old. The oldest was 65. Every single one of them was male. Every single death was described as “crossfire.”

By March 2010, RAB’s own Director General admitted the total had reached 622 people.

That number didn’t include disappearances. Or torture. Or the people who survived a “crossfire” incident but never spoke about it again.

The Pattern They Ran Every Time

There’s a template. It was so consistent that human rights investigators could describe it in advance before a killing even happened.

Step one: Detention. The target is picked up — often at night, often without a warrant, often without any paperwork that would acknowledge the detention happened at all.

Step two: Torture. Human Rights Watch documented this extensively. Interrogation methods. Sleep deprivation. Beatings. The goal was either to extract a confession or to break someone down so completely that they couldn’t reliably report what happened to them.

Step three: The Killing. The target is transported — to a riverbank, a field, somewhere dark and isolated — and shot. Sometimes multiple times. The location would be somewhere plausible for a “criminal encounter.”

Step four: The Story. A press release goes out. The victim was a criminal. He had outstanding warrants. RAB attempted to apprehend him. He opened fire. RAB returned fire in self-defence. It was regrettable.

The problem with this story — as Human Rights Watch laid out in their landmark 2006 report “Judge, Jury, and Executioner” — is that it was physically impossible in the majority of documented cases. Ballistic evidence didn’t match the narrative. Witness accounts contradicted it. The geometry of the shooting scenes told a different story than the press releases.

Between January and October 2005 alone, an estimated 300 people were killed at the hands of security forces. That’s one person every single day, for ten months. For an entire year, Bangladesh’s families went to bed knowing that if the state decided your name was on a list, you were already dead.

What The Families Were Left With

Hasan was a rickshaw driver from Narayanganj. RAB picked him up on a Tuesday evening. By Wednesday morning, officers were at his door explaining that he’d been shot in a “crossfire incident” during an arrest attempt. He had, according to RAB, been a member of a criminal gang.

His wife had no idea. As far as she knew, her husband drove a rickshaw and came home every night smelling of exhaust and sweat. She had three children under ten. She had no savings. Their rent was paid week to week.

When she tried to file a complaint, she was told — quietly, by someone who seemed genuinely afraid — that this was not something to pursue. That families who pursued these cases had a way of finding themselves in difficult situations. That it would be better for her and her children to grieve quietly.

She’s not named here because families like hers are still living in Bangladesh. Under the same institutions. With the same RAB.

This story isn’t unique. It is, with variations in name and city, the story of hundreds of families. HRW documented it. Odhikar documented it. Ain O Shalish Kendra compiled the numbers year by year. What none of those reports can fully capture is the compounding economic catastrophe that follows the killing.

The male victim was almost always a breadwinner. His wife inherits nothing but a body, a police story that cannot be challenged, children who are now one income source short, and a community that has watched what happens when families ask too many questions about RAB. The message is clear. The silence is rational. The suffering continues invisibly.

Who The Victims Actually Were

RAB’s official line, faithfully repeated in BNP government statements throughout 2004–2006, was that crossfire victims were criminals. Drug dealers. Extortionists. Gang members. People society was better off without.

The Human Rights Watch investigation found something different.

Some victims did have criminal records. But the pattern of who got killed was not determined by the severity of their alleged crimes or whether they’d been convicted of anything. It tracked closely with whether they’d made an enemy of someone with political connections. Whether they’d refused to pay extortion. Whether they were perceived as linked to the opposition. Whether they’d witnessed something that someone powerful didn’t want witnessed.

The killing of Shaikh Farid illustrates this. His family maintained he had no criminal background. He was a local businessman. He was picked up by RAB in what his relatives described as a targeted operation. The official account said he died in crossfire while being taken to identify his alleged criminal associates.

The number 367 represents 367 individual cases. Each one has a family. Each family has a version of events that differs from the official press release. Almost none of them will ever get a day in court.

The youngest victim was 14 years old. Think about that for a moment. RAB shot a 14-year-old and called it crossfire. And the BNP government that created RAB said nothing. The Home Ministry, overseen by Lutfozzaman Babar — the same man later sentenced to death for the August 21 grenade attack — defended the operations as necessary crime control.

What Happened When The World Finally Noticed

For years, Bangladesh’s international partners largely looked away. RAB was positioned as a stability asset in a volatile region. Some Western governments that supported counterterrorism cooperation found it convenient not to ask hard questions about what RAB was doing between operations.

Amnesty International filed report after report. Human Rights Watch published “Judge, Jury, and Executioner” in December 2006, right at the end of BNP’s tenure, laying out the full picture. The UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial killings issued findings. The documentation was thorough, damning, and widely circulated.

The BNP government’s response was to dismiss it. “Crossfire” was a necessary tool of crime control. Criminals who attacked security forces got what they deserved. The international criticism was politically motivated. These were talking points, not answers.

It took fifteen years — and a dramatic escalation in enforced disappearances and killings under subsequent governments — before real consequences arrived.

On 10 December 2021 — International Human Rights Day — the United States Treasury Department imposed Global Magnitsky Act sanctions on RAB and seven of its current and former senior officers, including Benazir Ahmed, who had served as RAB Director General and was at the time Inspector General of Police.

The Treasury statement was explicit: RAB and its officers were sanctioned for “serious human rights violations” — including extrajudicial killings, enforced disappearances, and torture.

“NGOs have alleged that RAB and other Bangladeshi law enforcement are responsible for more than 600 disappearances since 2009, nearly 600 extrajudicial killings since 2018, and torture,” the Treasury statement read.

This was the US government — officially — saying what Bangladeshi human rights organisations had been saying for nearly two decades. The force BNP built, the force BNP defended, the force BNP used as a tool of political control: sanctioned by America under a law designed for the world’s worst human rights violators.

Following the sanctions, something remarkable happened. Extrajudicial killings and enforced disappearances dropped dramatically — according to a US assessment from January 2023. Which suggests that they were never really about crime control. They stopped when there was a price to pay. They had always been a choice.

The Accountability That Never Came

Not one RAB officer has ever been convicted of an extrajudicial killing in Bangladesh.

Read that again. Six hundred and twenty-two confirmed deaths. Documented torture. Detailed reports from Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, Odhikar, Ain O Shalish Kendra. US sanctions identifying specific named officers. And not one conviction.

When families have tried to pursue cases — and some have, at enormous personal risk — the cases have encountered familiar obstacles. Witnesses recant. Evidence disappears. Judges receive threatening phone calls. Cases are adjourned indefinitely. Prosecutors find procedural reasons to delay. And eventually the family runs out of money, or patience, or safety, and the case dies without a verdict.

This is what impunity looks like from the inside.

Human Rights Watch described RAB as operating as “judge, jury, and executioner.” That phrase was chosen carefully. RAB’s killings were not rogue acts by rogue officers. They were systematic. They followed a protocol. They required coordination across multiple ranks. Officers who participated were not disciplined. They were promoted.

Under BNP’s watch from 2004 to 2006, RAB killed 367 people and received official support from the government that created it. The Home Minister defended the practice. The Prime Minister said nothing to contradict it. The state owned these killings, even as it used the word “crossfire” to make them sound like something other than executions.

Under The New Government: Same Machine, New Operators

When BNP swept back to power following the 2026 elections, one of the central questions in the human rights community was simple: what would they do with RAB?

They created it. They defended it. They used it to kill hundreds of people during 2004–2006. Then they spent fifteen years in opposition calling every subsequent RAB killing evidence of the previous government’s brutality.

The answer, so far, has been: nothing has changed. The institutional machinery that executes people and calls it crossfire is still in place. The officers who oversaw operations are still serving. The families of BNP-era victims are still waiting for acknowledgement, let alone justice.

In fact, the trajectory since the July 2024 uprising has been deeply troubling. The US sanctions — which demonstrably reduced killings — have become a point of diplomatic friction rather than a mechanism for accountability. BNP’s government has been more interested in getting those sanctions lifted than in establishing the accountability framework that would make lifting them warranted.

Meanwhile, the widows are still waiting.

The Names Behind The Numbers

Every human rights organisation will tell you the same thing: statistics are important, but they’re also a way for the mind to distance itself from what actually happened. Six hundred and twenty-two is a number. It’s easier to process than six hundred and twenty-two families whose world ended with a phone call.

Ain O Shalish Kendra compiled their database year by year, listing names, dates, locations, ages. The 14-year-old. The 65-year-old. The rickshaw driver from Narayanganj. The shopkeeper from Sylhet. The man from Khulna who witnesses say had no criminal record whatsoever but had a dispute with a local BNP functionary three weeks before he died.

HRW interviewed family members who described the same thing over and over: their husband, father, son was taken. He had no weapons. He had no opportunity to open fire on anyone. The story they were given was impossible. And there was nowhere to report that the story was impossible, because the state that killed their family member was also the state that ran the courts.

These are not abstract victims of an abstract policy. They were people. Most of them were poor. Almost all of them were male. None of them received a trial. None of them were presumed innocent. RAB decided they were criminals. RAB was the judge, the jury, and the executioner. And then RAB went home.

What Justice Would Actually Look Like

It starts with acknowledgement. Not a press release, not a parliamentary motion — actual acknowledgement that what RAB did under BNP’s watch was extrajudicial killing, not law enforcement. That calling it “crossfire” was a lie. That the government that created RAB, funded RAB, and defended RAB in public bears responsibility for every one of those 367 deaths under their watch.

It continues with accountability. Bangladesh has a Commission of Inquiry mechanism. It has courts. It has, theoretically, an independent judiciary — though as this publication has documented, the current BNP government is actively dismantling the very ordinances designed to protect that independence. An independent investigation into documented RAB killings, with power to compel testimony and access records, would be a starting point.

It includes compensation. The families of extrajudicial killing victims in Bangladesh have received almost nothing. Some NGOs have provided support. No government compensation scheme has ever been established. The economic devastation that follows the killing of a breadwinner in a family with no savings is multi-generational. It can be partially addressed. It hasn’t been.

And it requires institutional reform. RAB in its current form is structurally unaccountable. Complaints go to the same chain of command that ordered the operations. The oversight mechanisms that exist on paper don’t function in practice. This is not an accident. It was designed this way.

The US sanctions were not enough. They reduced killings, which is significant — it means lives were saved. But they don’t deliver justice to the families who have already lost someone. They don’t put a single officer in a courtroom. They don’t establish a record of what happened and who ordered it.

Before You Move On From This Number

Six hundred and twenty-two confirmed deaths. Hundreds more disappeared. Thousands of family members who received the same impossible phone call, the same impossible story, and the same choice: stay silent or risk becoming the next number in the database.

BNP built this institution. BNP defended it. BNP ran it for three years during which it killed hundreds of people. Then BNP spent fifteen years positioning themselves as victims of political persecution by other governments.

They are now the government again.

The crossfire widows are still there. Still waiting. Still watching a political class that created the machine that destroyed their families now talk about law, order, and democratic governance.

If BNP wants to prove that 2026 is different from 2004, there is a very specific test available to them. Acknowledge what RAB did. Commission an independent investigation. Compensate the families. Reform the institution or dissolve it.

The phone calls at two in the morning need to stop. So does the silence about the ones that already happened.

Sources: Human Rights Watch, “Judge, Jury, and Executioner” (December 2006); Human Rights Watch, “Crossfire” (May 2011); Ain O Shalish Kendra annual extrajudicial killing databases (2004–2010); US Treasury Department Global Magnitsky Sanctions announcement (December 10, 2021); Odhikar human rights reports; UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial killings findings; Global Policy Institute statistics (2005–2006).

Human Rights Watch is not a think tank. It is not an advocacy group. It does not take government money or grind political axes. It sends investigators to document what governments do to their own people — and then it publishes those findings for the world to read.

Between 2001 and 2006, HRW sent those investigators to Bangladesh. Again. And again. And again.

What they found was not complicated. There were bodies. There were torture marks on those bodies. There were people who had been arrested, dragged into custody, and killed — and then described as criminals who “died in crossfire” while trying to escape. There were minority communities being raped and looted while the state watched and did nothing. There were journalists beaten, opposition politicians murdered, and a security apparatus that operated outside every legal constraint because the people who built it were also the people who were supposed to contain it.

These are not allegations. They are documented findings. The reports are still on HRW’s website. Read them yourself.

The Reports That Built the Record

HRW published multiple major investigations into Bangladesh during the BNP-Jamaat tenure. Each one filled in another section of the same picture.

“Judge, Jury, and Executioner” (December 2006)

This 79-page report is the definitive record of what the Rapid Action Battalion did between its creation in 2004 and October 2006. HRW investigators documented 367 people killed by RAB. Not suspects who died during pursuit. Not criminals who fell in legitimate confrontations. People who were arrested, detained, tortured, and executed — then described by official spokespersons as casualties of “crossfire.”

The youngest victim was 14 years old.

HRW’s conclusion left no room for interpretation: “RAB has made a practice of killing criminal suspects in detention.”

The report documented the torture methods in clinical detail. Beatings were routine. Electric drills were used to bore holes into suspects’ bodies. Electric shocks were applied to sensitive areas. Victims were suspended by their arms from ceilings. Needles were inserted under fingernails. Each person who died in “crossfire” had been arrested first. Detained first. Subjected to this first. Then shot and left at a scene staged to look like a gun battle.

The pattern was so consistent, so predictable, that HRW could describe it algorithmically: arrest → torture → kill → claim crossfire. The same choreography, every time, for two years straight.

“Breach of Faith” (June 2005)

This 45-page report documented a different atrocity — the systematic persecution of the Ahmadiyya Muslim community under the BNP-Jamaat government.

The Khatme Nabuwat — an umbrella coalition of Sunni extremist groups — attacked Ahmadiyya mosques, beat and killed Ahmadis, blocked their children from schools, and destroyed their livelihoods. This was not mob violence that caught the government off guard. This was organized, sustained, and carried out in full daylight while the BNP-Jamaat coalition watched. The BNP’s coalition partner, Jamaat-e-Islami, was actively aligned with the persecution.

HRW’s recommendation to the government was direct: investigate the attacks, prosecute the perpetrators and their sponsors, protect the Ahmadiyya community.

The government ignored it. The attacks continued.

The Ahmadiyya were not alone. The 2005 report arrived against the backdrop of a broader pattern of minority persecution that was already three years old. After the October 2001 election, a judicial commission later found that over 18,000 rapes of Hindu women had been committed in the post-election violence, with 25 Ministers and MPs of the BNP-Jamaat government identified as complicit in orchestrating the attacks. In Bhola’s Char Fasson upazila alone, approximately 600 Hindu women were gang-raped. The youngest victim was 8 years old. The oldest was 70.

The government’s response to that violence? Nothing. The perpetrators were BNP activists, the victims were a minority community that voted against them, and the architecture of accountability had already been repurposed into an architecture of impunity.

The Annual World Reports: A Year-by-Year Indictment

HRW’s World Reports on Bangladesh between 2002 and 2008 read like a crime log with commentary. Each year added new entries to the same ledger.

2002. The post-election violence against Hindus. Operation Clean Heart — the mass military sweep launched by the BNP government that killed at least 44 people in custody, with official spokespeople claiming each death was a “heart attack.” HRW documented that at least 60 people died in custody during the operation. The government never seriously investigated a single one.

2003. The Indemnity Act was passed. This piece of legislation retroactively granted immunity to every soldier and official involved in Operation Clean Heart. No prosecutions. No accountability. Just a law that said: the people who did this are protected, and they will continue to be protected. HRW condemned it. The government did not respond.

2004. RAB was created in June. The killings began within weeks — 114 dead in its first year alone. In August, the August 21 grenade attack killed 24 people and injured over 500 at an Awami League rally. The government fabricated a cover story involving a pickpocket named “Joj Mia” who supposedly triggered the grenades accidentally. HRW and every credible observer dismissed this immediately. The same year, the Chittagong arms haul was discovered — 4,930 guns, 27,020 grenades, and 840 rocket launchers moving through the port — and the BNP government moved swiftly to shut down the investigation.

2005. RAB accelerated. Between January and October 2005 alone, HRW documented an estimated 300 people killed at the hands of security forces — a rate of roughly one person every day. On August 17, 2005, JMB detonated coordinated bombs across 63 of Bangladesh’s 64 districts in a single afternoon, killing 2 and injuring over 700, demonstrating that a militant infrastructure had been allowed to metastasize under the BNP government’s watch. The Ahmadiyya persecution continued. Journalists were beaten.

2006. By October 1, RAB’s documented kill count reached 367. HRW’s “Judge, Jury, and Executioner” report was published in December. That same month, President Iajuddin Ahmed deployed the military ahead of a scheduled election, and HRW’s Brad Adams issued a public warning that has aged poorly for those who wanted to claim Bangladesh had turned a corner:

“Past experience with Bangladeshi leaders deploying the military gives us serious cause for concern. During the last major deployment, in 2002, more than 50 people died after being arrested by troops.”

“Abusive members of the military have enjoyed near-total immunity for their violent crimes in the past. If the military is to promote law and order today, it must respect the law.”

2008. HRW’s World Report noted that the January 11, 2007 emergency was triggered after the United Nations and European Union announced that election plans were so compromised they would not send observers. The international community had reached the same conclusion HRW had been documenting for five years: the BNP government had systematically destroyed every institution that might have held it accountable.

The Kill Count in Numbers

Numbers lose their weight when accumulated too fast. So read these slowly.

In 2002, at least 44 people died in custody during Operation Clean Heart. HRW’s count was at least 60. The government said heart attacks.

In 2004, RAB killed 114 people in its first year of operation.

In 2005, RAB killed 320. All security forces combined: 377 extrajudicial killings documented by the Global Policy Institute.

Between January and September 2006, RAB killed 246 more. By October 1, 2006, the total was 367.

All security forces in 2006: 362 extrajudicial killings.

These numbers were not disputed by multiple independent organizations. Ain O Shalish Kendra — Bangladesh’s own human rights monitoring organization — produced parallel counts that aligned with HRW’s findings. The Global Policy Institute produced their own. The numbers converged because the killings were real, documented, and so systematic that independent researchers could cross-reference them.

The Architecture of Impunity

HRW didn’t just count bodies. It analyzed why the killing continued year after year without consequence.

Five structural factors made accountability impossible under BNP rule.

First, the Indemnity Act. By retroactively immunizing every soldier and official involved in Operation Clean Heart, the BNP government established a precedent: security forces could kill in custody and be protected by legislation after the fact. The message to RAB was clear before RAB even existed.

Second, RAB’s institutional design. It was drawn from multiple branches — army, navy, air force, police, Ansar, BDR — which made accountability diffuse. When a RAB officer killed someone, responsibility could be shifted between agencies indefinitely. No single chain of command was ever fully answerable.

Third, political protection from the top. RAB reported to the Home Ministry. The Home Ministry was headed by Lutfozzaman Babar — the same man later sentenced to death for orchestrating the August 21 grenade attack that killed 24 people. The death squad reported to the architect of a political massacre. The possibility of accountability was not just limited; it was structurally eliminated.

Fourth, judicial complicity. Courts accepted “crossfire” narratives without investigation. HRW found that no RAB officer was convicted for any custodial killing during the entire BNP era. Not one.

Fifth, international silence. Donor governments continued military and security assistance to Bangladesh throughout this period without conditioning it on human rights improvements. HRW named this too: the international community, by continuing to fund the security apparatus, bore some responsibility for the impunity it enabled.

The Government’s Standard Response

The BNP government had a playbook for responding to HRW. It never varied.

First, deny. Call the reports “exaggerated” or “politically motivated.” Never engage with specific findings or specific names.

Second, deflect. Point to crime statistics to justify RAB. Bangladesh had a serious crime problem — everyone agreed on that. The question was whether the solution could involve executing over 300 people per year outside any legal process.

Third, ignore. No meaningful investigations. No prosecutions. No committee reviews. No policy changes. The reports went unacknowledged at the institutional level.

Fourth, counter-accuse. HRW was biased toward the Awami League. The findings were partisan. Every human rights organization that documented BNP abuses was, by definition, an AL tool.

When Brad Adams called for accountability in December 2006, the government did not respond to a single recommendation. When “Breach of Faith” detailed the Ahmadiyya persecution, the coalition moved closer to restricting Ahmadiyya publications, not further from it. The reports produced no reforms because the people being documented had no interest in accountability and faced no external pressure strong enough to change that calculus.

Why the Record Matters in 2026

The pattern HRW documented between 2001 and 2006 did not end in 2007.

The same RAB that killed 367 people under BNP rule was sanctioned by the US Treasury Department in December 2021 under Global Magnitsky authorities — for extrajudicial killings, enforced disappearances, and torture that continued across successive governments. The institution was never reformed. It was inherited, expanded, and used by everyone who came after.

The same Lutfozzaman Babar who oversaw RAB as Home Minister was convicted in 2018 and sentenced to death for the August 21 grenade attack. He built a death squad. He orchestrated a mass assassination attempt. Both operations ran through the same Home Ministry, in the same political era, with the same culture of impunity.

Now, in 2026, every BNP-era conviction has been overturned. The courts that produced those convictions have been reconstituted. The people who documented the abuses — journalists, activists, human rights lawyers — face new pressures. And the government telling Bangladeshis to forget is the same government whose institutional history HRW spent five years building into a public record.

The reports haven’t changed. HRW published what it found. The findings are documented, sourced, and archived. The question is not whether the evidence exists. It does. The question is what Bangladesh’s institutions, its courts, its press, and its citizens choose to do with it.

The answer to that question is still being written.

Sources:

• Human Rights Watch, “Judge, Jury, and Executioner: Torture and Extrajudicial Killings by Bangladesh’s Elite Security Force” (December 2006)
• Human Rights Watch, “Breach of Faith: Persecution of the Ahmadiyya Community in Bangladesh” (June 2005)
• Human Rights Watch, “Crossfire: Continued Human Rights Abuses by Bangladesh’s Rapid Action Battalion” (May 2011)
• Human Rights Watch, “Ignoring Executions and Torture: Impunity for Bangladesh’s Security Forces” (May 2009)
• Human Rights Watch, World Reports 2002–2008 (Bangladesh chapters)
• Human Rights Watch, “Bangladesh: Military Must Stay Neutral in Election Campaign” (December 12, 2006)
• US Treasury Department, Global Magnitsky Sanctions on RAB (December 10, 2021)
• Ain O Shalish Kendra — RAB killing statistics (2004–2006)
• Global Policy Institute — Extrajudicial killing statistics (2005–2006)
• Bangladesh Judicial Inquiry Commission findings (2009–2011), as reported by BBC (December 2, 2011) and bdnews24.com (April 24, 2011)

On August 21, 2004, thirteen military-grade grenades were thrown into a crowd of 20,000 people. The weapon used — the Arges grenade — is not available in any bazaar, cannot be purchased, and is not manufactured in Bangladesh. Its presence on a Dhaka street, in the hands of militants, tells you something. What it tells you is this: somewhere in the chain between its manufacture and its detonation, the state was involved. This piece follows that chain.

Start with what an Arges grenade actually is.

The Arges grenade is a hand grenade manufactured by Argeswerke GmbH, an Austrian defense contractor. It was developed for military application — not police use, not riot control, not civilian self-defense. It is designed to kill people in combat. The fragmentation radius is lethal. The manufacturing standards are military-specification. You do not buy one at a hardware store. You do not acquire one through ordinary criminal channels. The supply chain for Arges grenades runs through military procurement: government-to-government arms transfers, licensed military suppliers, state intelligence services.

That is the starting point. Everything else follows from it.

On August 21, 2004, at 5:22 in the afternoon, Mufti Abdul Hannan — chief of Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami Bangladesh, known as HuJI — handed fifteen Arges grenades to a twelve-man attack team assembled outside Golap Shah Mazar in Dhaka. The team had already prayed together and had lunch. A religious sermon had been delivered. The code name for what they were about to do was “Sheikh Hasina Ke Nashta Korano” — “Light Snacks for Sheikh Hasina.” They walked to positions around a rally on Bangabandhu Avenue where 20,000 people had gathered.

At 5:22 PM, Abu Jandal threw the first grenade. Twelve more followed. Twenty-four people died. More than five hundred were injured. Sheikh Hasina survived with permanent hearing damage she carries to this day.

Where did fifteen military-grade Austrian grenades come from?

The Supply Chain

The answer came not from the BNP government, which spent two years fabricating an alternative story about a pickpocket named Joj Mia. It came from Abdul Majed Bhat, also known as Yusuf Bhat — a Pakistani militant who was among those eventually arrested and tried. In his confessional statement, Bhat identified the source.

The grenades originated with Muzaffar Ahmad Shah, an operative of Tehrik-e-Jihad Islami, a Pakistan-based militant organization known as TEJI. Shah provided the grenades to Maulana Tajuddin — a Bangladeshi militant who was also the brother of BNP politician Abdus Salam Pintu, then serving as Deputy Minister for Education in Khaleda Zia’s cabinet. The grenades were originally intended for transfer to Indian militant groups active in the northeast. Tajuddin kept them instead.

They then passed from Tajuddin to Mufti Hannan. From Hannan to the twelve-man team. From the team to the crowd of 20,000.

So the supply chain runs: Pakistani militant network → BNP deputy minister’s brother → HuJI chief → political rally. Every link in that chain was connected, in some way, to the political apparatus of the government in power. Tajuddin was Pintu’s brother. Pintu was a minister. The attack was carried out at a rally of the opposition.

This is not circumstantial. The trial court’s 2018 verdict found it proven beyond reasonable doubt. Judge Shahed Nuruddin, presiding over the Speedy Trial Tribunal-1, made the state connection explicit: “The specialised deadly Arges grenades that are used in wars were blasted at the Awami League’s central office on 23 Bangabandhu Avenue in broad daylight with the help of the then state machinery.”

With the help of the then state machinery. A judge. A verdict. Not an opposition accusation, not a political speech, not a newspaper editorial. A formal finding of fact in a court of law.

What the State Did Before the Attack

The chain of command established in the 2018 verdict goes significantly higher than Maulana Tajuddin. Planning meetings were held at Hawa Bhaban — the political office of Tarique Rahman, son of Prime Minister Khaleda Zia and the de facto power center of the BNP government. The attendees at those meetings, as established by the verdict, included:

Tarique Rahman, convicted in absentia and sentenced to life imprisonment. His political office was the venue. His political network was the organizing infrastructure.

Lutfozzaman Babar, State Minister for Home Affairs. He had direct authority over Bangladesh Police, the intelligence services, and the security apparatus. He provided government backing. He assured the HuJI operatives of administrative support. Sentenced to death.

Harris Chowdhury, Political Secretary to Prime Minister Khaleda Zia. Present at planning meetings at Hawa Bhaban. Sentenced to life imprisonment.

Brigadier General Abdur Rahim, Director General of the National Security Intelligence (NSI). Participated in planning. Sentenced to death.

Brigadier General Rezzaqul Haider Chowdhury, Director General of the DGFI — the Directorate General of Forces Intelligence, Bangladesh’s military intelligence agency. Participated in planning. Sentenced to death.

Ali Ahsan Mohammad Mojaheed, Secretary General of Jamaat-e-Islami and Social Welfare Minister. Participated in planning meetings. Later executed for 1971 war crimes in a separate case.

Let that list settle for a moment. The Home Minister. The PM’s political secretary. The heads of both the civilian and military intelligence services. All found, by a court, to have been in the room when the murder of an opposition leader was planned.

The grenades did not arrive in Bangladesh through some invisible underground channel. Military-grade weapons travel through state-accessible networks. The people who planned the attack ran the state. The correlation is not accidental.

What the State Did After the Attack

If there were any doubt about state involvement, the government’s actions after August 21, 2004 remove it. Nobody innocent behaves the way this government behaved.

Within hours, police — who answer to the Home Ministry, which is to say Lutfozzaman Babar — fired tear gas and charged batons against Awami League members who were trying to rescue the wounded from the blast site. Not at the attackers, who were long gone. At the victims and their helpers.

The crime scene was washed with water and detergent. Evidence was destroyed. Recovered intact grenades, which should have been preserved as forensic exhibits, were deliberately destroyed rather than sent for analysis. Police refused to register any criminal complaint filed by the Awami League — the party whose rally had just been attacked, whose members were still dying in hospitals. Only a general diary was filed. Not a case. A diary entry.

The bodies of victims were initially withheld. The government refused to hand them over.

Then came the fabrication. The Crime Investigation Department — again, operating under the Home Ministry, which is to say under Babar — constructed a false narrative. They identified one Joj Mia, a petty criminal from Noakhali with no connection to the attack, as the perpetrator. On June 10, 2005 — ten months after the attack — Joj Mia was arrested from his home. On June 26, 2005, under torture, he gave a false confession under Section 164 before a magistrate implicating a criminal gang called the Seven Star Group.

The confession was fabricated. The story collapsed when journalists and legal observers found its internal contradictions. Joj Mia had been coerced into confessing to a mass murder he had no knowledge of, to protect the people who actually planned it.

A second victim, Shaibal Saha Partha, was also arrested, tortured in custody, and forced to give a false confessional statement. He was eventually released. He still suffers from post-traumatic stress.

The government’s one-man judicial commission — headed by Justice Joynal Abedin, who was subsequently elevated to the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court in what The Daily Star described as a reward for his services — produced a report blaming the attack on “foreign and local enemies.” No specifics. No names. A report designed to produce nothing. Which is exactly what it produced.

For two full years, from August 2004 to January 2007, the BNP government ensured that the real perpetrators were never charged, never investigated, and in fact actively protected while innocent people were tortured into false confessions.

What the Real Investigation Found

It took 1/11 — the emergency and the caretaker government — to produce a real investigation. In November 2007, Mufti Abdul Hannan, by then arrested, revealed the truth for the first time: HuJI carried out the attack. Maulana Tajuddin was the liaison. The support came from the political leadership of the BNP government.

The FBI and Interpol both provided technical assistance to the investigation. US President George W. Bush had expressed “shock” through Secretary of State Colin Powell immediately after the attack. The UK, Netherlands, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, and Sweden all condemned it. International forensic and intelligence resources were brought to bear.

By 2011, Mufti Hannan had given a detailed confessional statement naming Tarique Rahman, Lutfozzaman Babar, Harris Chowdhury, Abdus Salam Pintu, and Kazi Shah Mofazzal Hossain Kaikobad, as well as senior officials of the Home Ministry, Police, DGFI, NSI, and the Prime Minister’s Office.

The charge sheet eventually named 52 accused. The case went to trial. In October 2018, 19 people were sentenced to death and 19 to life imprisonment for the murder of 24 people on August 21, 2004.

It had taken fourteen years from the day of the attack to reach a verdict.

The Rooftops Were Cleared

One detail from the trial record deserves particular attention, because it captures the depth of state complicity more precisely than any individual name or rank.

At Awami League rallies, the party’s security volunteers — the Sechchasebak and Chhatra League — customarily secured the rooftops of buildings overlooking the venue. This is standard crowd protection practice. On August 21, 2004, they were specifically denied access. The rooftops were closed to AL security personnel.

The twelve HuJI operatives took positions on those rooftops.

Someone cleared those rooftops. Someone told AL’s security volunteers they could not access them. That decision required authority over the buildings and their security arrangements. It required coordination between whoever managed venue security and whoever was planning the attack. It is not something that happens by accident.

The Arges grenades were military-grade weapons from a military supply chain. The rooftops were cleared. The crime scene was washed. The investigation was killed. The witnesses were tortured. The commission produced nothing. The real investigators were blocked for two years.

These are not the actions of a government that had nothing to do with what happened.

The Acquittals

On December 1, 2024, the High Court of Bangladesh acquitted all 49 accused in the August 21 grenade attack case. Every person convicted of the murder of 24 people walked free. Tarique Rahman, convicted to life imprisonment. Lutfozzaman Babar, sentenced to death. Brigadier General Abdur Rahim, sentenced to death. Brigadier General Rezzaqul Haider Chowdhury, sentenced to death. All acquitted.

On September 4, 2025, the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court dismissed a petition for retrial. The acquittals were final.

The speed and totality of the reversals were remarkable. The High Court did not distinguish between individuals. It did not identify weaknesses in specific charges while upholding others. It acquitted everyone, simultaneously, within weeks of the BNP-aligned political transformation following July 2024. The pattern was not subtle.

This is not a critique of courts in general. Courts make errors. Evidence is weighed differently by different judges. Appeals exist for good reasons. But what happened to the August 21 case was not careful judicial re-examination. It was mass acquittal in a politically transformed environment, of people connected to the party now in power, at a speed that allows no other interpretation.

The judge in 2018 found that military-grade grenades were detonated in a civilian crowd “with the help of the then state machinery.” The High Court in 2024 found that nobody was responsible for any of it. One of these findings is correct. They cannot both be.

Why It Matters That He Is Prime Minister Now

Tarique Rahman is the current Prime Minister of Bangladesh. He was convicted in 2018 of participating in the planning of the attack that killed 24 people and injured more than 500 others. He was acquitted in 2024. He returned to Bangladesh in late 2025. He won the 2026 general election and was sworn in as Prime Minister on February 17, 2026.

The people now running Bangladesh include those who, per a 2018 court verdict, planned a mass murder in 2004, covered it up for two years, tortured false witnesses, laundered military-grade weapons through a jihadi network, and used the state machinery of law enforcement and intelligence to protect perpetrators and prosecute investigators.

The grenades did not appear from nowhere. They were Austrian military-specification weapons that passed through a Pakistani militant network to the brother of a BNP minister before reaching the hands of a jihadi chief who distributed them to a twelve-man death squad. The planning happened in the ruling party’s political office. The state’s intelligence chiefs were in the room. The Home Minister ran the cover-up.

None of this is allegation. None of it is opposition propaganda. It is the finding of a Bangladeshi court, in a proceeding that took more than a decade, with 52 accused and testimony from dozens of witnesses including the confessions of the organizers themselves.

That court’s verdict was reversed. The records, however, have not been erased. The confessions exist. The forensic evidence exists. The testimonies exist. The judge’s words exist: “specialised deadly Arges grenades that are used in wars were blasted at the Awami League’s central office on 23 Bangabandhu Avenue in broad daylight with the help of the then state machinery.”

Fourteen years after the attack. Six years after the verdict. The weapons have been accounted for. The supply chain has been traced. The planning has been documented. The cover-up has been reconstructed. The verdict has been reversed.

But the grenades still fell. The 24 still died. The five hundred still bled on a Dhaka street on a Saturday afternoon in August 2004.

Acquittals do not bring them back. They do not undo what happened. They do not change what the grenades were, where they came from, or who cleared the rooftops so they could be thrown.

That is the record. It has not been retried. It has only been buried.

Sources: Dhaka Speedy Trial Tribunal-1 verdict, October 10, 2018 (Judge Shahed Nuruddin); confessional statements of Abdul Majed Bhat, Mufti Abdul Hannan (2007 and 2011); CID supplementary charge sheet, July 2011; High Court acquittal order, December 1, 2024; Supreme Court dismissal of retrial petition, September 4, 2025; The Daily Star coverage of August 21, 2004 and subsequent investigation; AFP reporting on the verdict; US State Department statements (Colin Powell, August 2004); International condemnation statements (UK, Netherlands, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Sweden); FBI and Interpol technical assistance records; Wikipedia documentation of the August 21, 2004 grenade attack.