Crossfire (Bangladesh)
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Crossfire (Bangladesh)
Crossfire refers to the of death of a person by gun shot, oftentimes under the custody of a law enforcement agency in Bangladesh. There are accusations that it is staged extra-judicial killing. In March 2010, the then director general of the elite law enforcement agency of Bangladesh, Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) said that since it was started in 2004 RAB had killed 622 people. Human Rights Watch, a New York-based NGO, has described RAB as a Bangladeshi government death squad. Odhikar, a Dhaka-based human rights organization, reported at least 1,169 people lost their lives in extrajudicial killings between January 2009 and May 2016 in Bangladesh. According to Odhikar, in June 2016, extrajudicial killings in the country took at least 24 lives. According to another rights group, Ain O Salish Kendra, 79 people were killed in so-called shootouts while in police custody in Bangladesh in the first six months of 2016. The police were involved in 37 of these deaths. Of them, seven had been i ...
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Bangladesh
Bangladesh (}, ), officially the People's Republic of Bangladesh, is a country in South Asia. It is the eighth-most populous country in the world, with a population exceeding 165 million people in an area of . Bangladesh is among the most densely populated countries in the world, and shares land borders with India to the west, north, and east, and Myanmar to the southeast; to the south it has a coastline along the Bay of Bengal. It is narrowly separated from Bhutan and Nepal by the Siliguri Corridor; and from China by the Indian state of Sikkim in the north. Dhaka, the capital and largest city, is the nation's political, financial and cultural centre. Chittagong, the second-largest city, is the busiest port on the Bay of Bengal. The official language is Bengali, one of the easternmost branches of the Indo-European language family. Bangladesh forms the sovereign part of the historic and ethnolinguistic region of Bengal, which was divided during the Partition of India in ...
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Extra-judicial Killing
An extrajudicial killing (also known as extrajudicial execution or extralegal killing) is the deliberate killing of a person without the lawful authority granted by a judicial proceeding. It typically refers to government authorities, whether lawfully or unlawfully, targeting specific people for death, which in authoritarian regimes often involves political, trade union, dissident, religious and social figures. The term is typically used in situations that imply the human rights of the victims have been violated; deaths caused by legitimate warfighting or police actions are generally not included, even though military and police forces are often used for killings seen by critics as illegitimate. The label "extrajudicial killing" has also been applied to organized, lethal enforcement of extralegal social norms by non-government actors, including lynchings and honor killings. United Nations Morris Tidball-Binz was appointed the United Nations Special Rapporteur on extrajudicia ...
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Rapid Action Battalion
Rapid Action Battalion or RAB, is an anti-crime and anti-terrorism unit of the Bangladesh Police. This elite force consists of members of the Bangladesh Army, Bangladesh Police, Bangladesh Navy, Bangladesh Air Force, Border Guard Bangladesh, Bangladesh Civil Service and Bangladesh Ansar. It was formed on 26 March 2004 as RAT (Rapid Action Team), and commenced operations on 14 April 2004. From 2004 to 2008 RAB had killed 1,062 people. The Rapid Action Battalion has been criticized by rights groups for its use of extrajudicial killings and is accused of forced disappearances. History 2003-2008 Rapid Action Battalion was formed on 12 July 2003 under the Armed Police Battalion (Amendment) Act, 2003. The act was passed through the amendment of Armed Forces Battalion Ordinance 1979 which provides immunity to RAB officers for actions taken in the course of their duty. Each battalion of Rapid Action Battalion is commanded by Additional Deputy Inspector General rank officer or its ...
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Death Squad
A death squad is an armed group whose primary activity is carrying out extrajudicial killings or forced disappearances as part of political repression, genocide, ethnic cleansing, or revolutionary terror. Except in rare cases in which they are formed by an insurgency, domestic or foreign governments actively participate in, support, or ignore the death squad's activities. Death squads are distinct from assassination from their permanent organization and the larger number of victims (typically thousands or more) who may not be prominent individuals. Other violence, such as rape, torture, arson, or bombings may be carried out alongside murders. They may comprise a secret police force, paramilitary militia groups, government soldiers, policemen, or combinations thereof. They may also be organized as vigilantes, bounty hunters, mercenaries, or contract killers. When death squads are not controlled by the state, they may consist of insurgent forces or organized crime, such as the ones ...
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Killing Of Ekramul Haque
Killing of Ekramul Haque refers to the extrajudicial killing of Ekramul Haque, councillor of Teknaf Municipality Ward three, by a unit of Rapid Action Battalion. That resulted in the first usage of the Magnitsky Act against Bangladeshi officials. Events Ekramul Haque was a trader who had been elected councilor of Teknaf Municipality three times in a row as a candidate of Awami League. Haque was a former President of Teknaf unit of Jubo League, the youth wing of Awami League, for 13 years. Bangladesh government was carrying a crackdown on the narcotics trade and the death of more than a 100 suspects in shoot-outs with law enforcement agencies. Since 2018 more than 200 individuals were killed in extrajudicial shootings by law enforcement agencies in Teknaf alone. On 27 May 2018, Ekramul Haque was killed in a gunfight with Rapid Action Battalion led by Squadron Leader Mohammad Rezaul Haque. Major Md Ruhul Amin, Company Commander of Rapid Action Battalion-7, said there was a gunf ...
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Shahidul Alam
Shahidul Alam (born 1955) is a Bangladeshi photojournalist, teacher and social activist. He has been a photographer for more than forty years and "his photographs have been published in almost every major western media outlet". Alam founded the Drik Picture Library in 1989, the Pathshala South Asian Media Institute in Dhaka in 1998, "which has trained hundreds of photographers", and the Chobi Mela International Photography Festival in 1999. Alam is a visiting professor at the University of Sunderland in the UK. His books include ''Nature's Fury'' (2007) and ''My Journey as a Witness'' (2011). In 2014 he was awarded the Shilpakala Padak by the President of Bangladesh and in 2018 the Humanitarian Award from the Lucie Awards. On 5 August 2018, Alam was arrested and detained shortly after giving an interview to Al Jazeera and posting live videos on Facebook that criticized the government's violent response to the 2018 Bangladesh road safety protests. Many international humanitari ...
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Encounter Killings By Police
Encounter killing is a term used in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka since the late 20th century to describe extrajudicial killings by the police or the armed forces, supposedly in self-defence, when they encounter suspected gangsters or terrorists in a shootout situation. Sometimes policemen are also killed by criminals in encounters. Critics are sceptical of the police motivation behind many of these reported incidents, and further complain that the wide acceptance of the practice has led to incidents of the police staging fake encounters to conceal the killing of suspects when they are either in custody or are unarmed or have surrendered. These are also termed ''fake encounters''. In some cases, surrendered criminals are shot in the leg as an extrajudicial punishment, and these are called as ''half encounters''. In the 1990s and the mid-2000s, the Mumbai Police used encounter killings to attack the city's underworld, and the practice spread to other large cities. In ...
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Forced Disappearance In Bangladesh
Enforced disappearances in Bangladesh are cases in which the Government of Bangladesh directly or indirectly kidnaps people and holds them incommunicado. According to a Dhaka-based human rights group Odhikar, at least 402 people have become victim of enforced disappearance from 2009 to 2017 under the current Awami League administration. These incidents along with extrajudicial killings in Bangladesh has been criticized by The United Nations and human rights groups including Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. Rapid Action Battalion (RAB), a special paramilitary unit in Bangladesh, is alleged to be behind most of these disappearances even though RAB claimed these allegations to be false. The current Awami League government denies involvement in these forced disappearances even when victims later surface in custody. According to the report of a domestic human rights organization, 82 people were forcefully disappeared from January to September in 2014. The activists and ...
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Bangladesh Drug War
The Bangladesh drug war or Bangladesh's war on drugs is an ongoing campaign against alleged drug dealers and users by the government of Bangladesh under Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina. The extrajudicial killings of alleged drug dealers by the elite anti-crime unit Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) and the police have been criticized by human rights groups and foreign diplomats. Background Bangladesh has an unknown number of drug addicts, with estimates ranging from 100,000 to 4 million. Since 2015, the Bangladesh government has focused on eradicating a cheap methamphetamine tablet known as Yaba, and police have made significant pill seizures during that time. More than 29 million "Yaba" pills were seized in 2016, in contrast to just 1.3 million in 2011, according to a 2016 Bangladeshi government report. There are allegations that a number of the larger dealers are linked to the ruling Bangladesh Awami League, Awami League party, and affiliated groups like Jubo League, ...
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Human Rights In Bangladesh
Human rights in Bangladesh are enshrined as fundamental rights in Part III of the Constitution of Bangladesh. However, constitutional and legal experts believe many of the country's laws require reform to enforce fundamental rights and reflect democratic values of the 21st century. Proposed reforms include strengthening parliamentary supremacy, judicial independence, the separation of powers, repealing laws which restrain freedom of the press and disbanding security agencies which violate civil liberties. Even though Bangladesh has Islam as its state religion and has constitutional references to Hindus, Christians and Buddhists; the political system is modeled as a secular democracy. Governments have generally respected freedom of religion, a cornerstone of the Bangladeshi constitution. However, the police have been slow in responding to and investigating attacks against minorities, opposition activists & supporters and purportedly brutally suppress lawful protest against the ...
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