Fugitive former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina orchestrated a “systematic attack” on protests against her government, Bangladeshi prosecutors have said at the opening of her trial over last year’s deadly crackdown. “Upon scrutinizing the evidence, we reached the conclusion that it was a coordinated, widespread and systematic attack,” Mohammad Tajul Islam, chief prosecutor at Bangladesh’s domestic International Crimes Tribunal (ICT), told the court in his opening speech on June 1. “The accused unleashed all law enforcement agencies and her armed party members to crush the uprising,” Islam said as he charged the 77-year-old former leader and two other officials of “abetment, incitement, complicity, facilitation, conspiracy, and failure to prevent mass murder” during the student-led mass uprising.
The United Nations says nearly 1,400 Bangladeshis were killed between July and August 2024 when Hasina’s government launched a brutal campaign to silence the protesters. Bangladesh has charged her with crimes against humanity over the killings. Hasina—who remains in self-imposed exile in neighboring India, her old ally—has rejected the charges as politically motivated. She fled by helicopter to New Delhi in August last year after the nationwide protests ended her “autocratic” 15-year rule marked by allegations of repeated human rights violations, including attacks, imprisonment, and even targeted killings of opposition figures, dissenters, and critics. She has since defied an arrest warrant and extradition order to return to Dhaka.
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