U.S. rights group slams Bangladesh security forces
14 Dec 2006 05:01:39 GMT Source: Reuters
By Michelle Nichols NEW YORK, Dec 14 (Reuters) - Bangladesh's elite security force has killed more than 350 people in custody and could be used by the country's former ruling party ahead of next month's election, a U.S.-based human rights group warned on Thursday. A 79-page Human Rights Watch report said the Rapid Action Battalions were also responsible for widespread torture that included beatings, boring holes in suspects with electric drills and giving them electric shocks. It is the second time in as many days the Rapid Action Battalions -- created to fight Islamic militants and crime -- have been slammed, with New Delhi-based Asian Center for Human Rights slating Bangladesh as South Asia's worst rights abuser. "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. Bangladesh government officials have said the government has given the elite security force a mandate to kill suspected criminals instead of making arrests and even drafted a list of most-wanted criminals to kill, Human Rights Watch said. A caretaker government is in charge in Bangladesh after Prime Minister Begum Khaleda Zia stepped down in October in accordance with the country's constitution, which requires power be given to an independent, interim authority that then has to organize free and fair elections within three months. Human Rights Watch said the Rapid Action Battalion killings have continued since the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, which has defended the killings as criminals who died when resisting arrest or were caught in a crossfire, handed over power. "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. The Bangladesh parliamentary elections are due to be held on Jan. 23. Human Rights Watch said that as of Oct. 1, the security force had been responsible for the deaths of 367 men around the country since its creation in 2004. "Whoever wins the elections must fundamentally reform the Rapid Action Battalion or abolish it," said Adams.
