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).
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