Khaleda blames AL for enforced disappearances

The Awami League has turned the country into a breeding ground for murder, abduction and enforced disappearances, BNP Chairperson Khaleda Zia said in a statement yesterday.

Her statement was issued after MM Aminur Rahman, secretary general of Bangladesh Kalyan Party, disappeared on the night of August 27.

Bangladesh Kalyan Party is an alliance partner of BNP.

“Since it assumed power, the present despotic government has turned the country into a breeding ground for murder, abduction and enforced disappearances,” the BNP chief said.

In its desperate bid to create a single-party socio-political system, the tyrannical government is tightening its grip with misrule, she also alleged. 

Expressing her concern over the recurring incidents of enforced disappearances, Khaleda alleged that the government itself is behind the incidents of the enforced disappearances as it wants to divert people's attention from the awkward situation that arose recently after its efforts to exert excessive force were faced with resistance. 

Meanwhile, BNP secretary general Mirza Fakhrul Islam Alamgir told a press conference at BNP's Nayapaltan headquarters that more than a thousand people were victims of forced disappearance in the country since 2009.

“The incidents of enforced disappearances are on the rise and it took a sharp rise over the last one week. This is a crime against humanity,” he said, adding that it is the government's responsibility to trace the people who disappeared and return them to their families.

Since the government is involved in the incidents of enforced disappearances, it does not even observe the UN's “International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances”, claimed Fakhrul.

Presenting a documentary on disappeared leaders and activists of his party, the BNP leader, quoting Ain o Salish Kendra, said around 539 people disappeared since 2009 till June this year while the number is 384 according to Odhikar.

“But the actual figure is much higher” and according to the party, more than a thousand people were subjected to enforced disappearance, he said, adding, “... some of them returned to their families later. I will give you the exact figure later.”

Responding to a query, Fakhrul said not a single incident of enforced disappearance took place during the term of the BNP-led four-party alliance government. “There were allegations of some incidents of extrajudicial killings [during the BNP tenure], but the forced disappearance is a new phenomenon that emerged since 2009.”