Bangladeshi force trained by UK police 'allowed to kill and torture'

Source: The Guardian

The Bangladeshi government has allowed a British-trained paramilitary force to secretly detain, torture and kill hundreds of people with impunity over the past two years, a report warns.

The report, released by the New York-based NGO, Human Rights Watch, catalogues a series of extrajudicial killings, forced disappearances and deaths in custody of the Rapid Action Battalion. Citing a lack of redress for victims, and the government's dismal record of failing to prosecute a single perpetrator, the NGO has called on the Bangladeshi government to disband the RAB and for the UK and US to withdraw support unless they take active steps to hold the force to account.

Torture methods listed in the report include burning with a hot iron, and beatings so severe that a victim's legs were "smashed and did not retain their usual shape; they were flattened". Mahabub Khokon told researchers that when he collected the body of his brother, Mohiuddin Arif, from the morgue after he was arrested by the RAB in February last year, repeated assaults had turned his legs green, skin had been scraped off several areas of his body, and his feet were swollen and looked as if they were "falling apart".

The 54-page report cites another instance from March this year, when a 34-year-old shopkeeper, Rasal Ahmed Bhutto, was picked up in the street outside a friend's shop in the capital, Dhaka, by men in plain clothes. A week later he was found shot dead and slumped against a nearby wall.

Read more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/may/10/bangladeshi-force-trained-uk-police