DHAKA: Bangladeshi prosecutors on Sunday opened the trial of fugitive former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, who is charged with orchestrating last year’s deadly crackdown on student-led protests.
Peaceful demonstrations, triggered by the reinstatement of a quota system for the allocation of civil service positions, began in early July 2024 but two weeks later they were met with a communications blackout and a violent crackdown by security forces.
In early August, as protesters defied a nationwide curfew, Hasina resigned and fled the country, ending 15 years in power of her Awami League party-led government.
“She unleashed various law enforcement and intelligence agencies against them (the protesting students) … They slaughtered the agitating students, injured them and committed crimes against humanity,” Mohammad Tajul Islam, chief prosecutor at Bangladesh’s domestic International Crimes Tribunal, told the court in his opening speech.
He charged the 77-year-old with “incitement, aiding and abetting, involvement in the commission of the crimes of murder, attempted murder, torture and other inhumane acts as part of the widespread and systematic attacks on innocent unarmed students and the public.”
The UN’s human rights office concluded in February that between July 15 and Aug. 5, 2024, the former government and its security and intelligence apparatus, together with “violent elements” linked to the Awami League, “engaged systematically in serious human rights violations and abuses in a coordinated effort to suppress the protest movement.”
It estimated that at least 1,400 people were killed during the protests, the majority by bullets from military rifles.
ICT investigators have collected video footage, audio clips, records of helicopter and drone movements, as well as statements from victims of the crackdown as part of the probe.
They also “seized records of telephonic conversations of Sheikh Hasina, in which she repeatedly confirmed that she ordered all the state agencies to eliminate innocent civilians peacefully protesting for a fair demand, using helicopters, drones and APCs (armored personnel carriers),” Islam said.
Sunday’s hearing was broadcast live for the first in the ICT’s history.
“The court accepted the charges against Sheikh Hasina, former Home Affairs Minister Asaduzzaman Khan Kamal and former police chief Chowdhury Abdullah Al-Mamun. There are five charges against them and the court accepted all five charges. We presented the charges through live broadcast before the nation,” Islam told reporters after the hearing.
Al-Mamun is the only accused who has been detained while the ex-home minister is in hiding and Hasina remains in self-imposed exile in neighboring India.
The next hearing is scheduled to take place on June 16. The tribunal ordered all three accused to be presented before the court.
The International Crimes Tribunal was established by Hasina in 2010 to investigate crimes committed by the Pakistani army and its loyalists during Bangladesh’s independence war in 1971.
Over the years, it grew to be widely seen as the Hasina government’s tool for eliminating political rivals.
