CrackdownIn a stark reckoning with the violent twilight of Sheikh Hasina’s rule, a Dhaka court on Monday sentenced three senior police officers, including the capital’s fugitive former police chief Habibur Rahman, to death by hanging for crimes against humanity, according To AFP.
The men, tried in absentia with their whereabouts unknown, were convicted for the lethal suppression of protesters on 5 August 2024, the very day Hasina fled her palace amid a storm of popular fury and sought refuge in India.
The case centred on the killing of six demonstrators in Dhaka that afternoon, when police acting on orders relayed by Rahman, unleashed live ammunition to disperse crowds.
Judge Golam Mortuza Mozumder’s verdict declared that the forces “opened fire with lethal weapons… causing death to the aforesaid six persons,” framing the acts as deliberate atrocities committed under Hasina’s embattled administration.
The ruling arrives on the cusp of national elections scheduled for 12 February, the first since the student led uprising toppled Hasina in August 2024, amid a fragile transition shadowed by the memory of bloodshed.
United Nations estimates place the toll from July to August at up to 1,400 lives lost as security forces sought to crush a swelling protest movement.
Five other former officers received prison terms of varying length, though chief prosecutor Tajul Islam expressed satisfaction with the death sentences while lamenting that harsher penalties were not imposed on the rest.
“The court has held that their crimes are proved and amount to crimes against humanity,” he told reporters outside the courtroom.
The judgment echoes an earlier November verdict from the same tribunal, which condemned Hasina herself, still in hiding in India, to death in absentia, alongside former interior minister Asaduzzaman Khan Kamal.
One cooperating defendant, ex-police chief Chowdhury Abdullah Al-Mamun, who appeared in court and pleaded guilty, was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment.
As Bangladesh edges toward its electoral reckoning, these sentences underscore a nation’s attempt to confront the ghosts of a repressive past.
