US rights group slams Bangladesh security forces

New York, Dec 15: Bangladesh's elite security force has killed nearly 370 people in custody and could be used by the former ruling party during campaigning for next month's election, a US-based human rights group said.

A 79-page Human Rights Watch report said the Rapid Action Battalion, or RAB, was also responsible for widespread torture that included beatings, boring holes in suspects with electric drills and giving them electric shocks.

It was the second time in two days the battalion -- created to fight Islamic militants and crime -- was criticized, after the New Delhi-based Asian Center for Human Rights called Bangladesh the worst rights abuser in South Asia.

''Bangladesh's Rapid Action Battalion has become a government death squad,'' said Brad Adams, Human Rights Watch's Asia director.

''Its methods are illegal and especially shameful to a nation whose citizen just won the Nobel Prize for peace.'' Muhammad Yunus won the 2006 peace prize with the Grameen Bank he founded to lend money to the poor of Bangladesh.

Officials at the Bangladesh Embassy were not immediately available for comment.

The top US diplomat for South Asia, Richard Boucher, echoed the issues raised about the battalion in the report.

''We have expressed our concerns that while they might be effective in the fight against terrorism, there are concerns about some of the killings that have occurred,'' Boucher said.

Human Rights Watch said Bangladesh's former government had given the elite security force a mandate to kill suspected criminals instead of making arrests and drafted a list of most-wanted criminals to execute.

A caretaker government is now in charge after Begum Khaleda Zia stepped down as prime minister in October in line with the constitution, which requires power be given to an independent, interim authority that must organize free and fair elections within three months.

Parliamentary elections are due to be held on January. 23.

Human Rights Watch said the killings have continued since the Bangladesh Nationalist Party handed over power. The party has defended the incidents as criminals who died while resisting arrest or were caught in crossfire.

''Human Rights Watch is concerned that Zia's Bangladesh Nationalist Party, which maintains great influence over the caretaker government and its security structures, may use RAB for political means during the campaign,'' the group said.

Human Rights Watch said the security force had been responsible for the deaths of 367 men around the country since the group's creation in 2004.

''Whoever wins the elections must fundamentally reform the Rapid Action Battalion or abolish it,'' Adams said.

Reuters

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