Extrajudicial killings must be probed

The government should probe the allegations of extrajudicial killings and enforced disappearances against law enforcers to uphold the image of the country, said eminent personalities yesterday.
Their call came a day after the US government in its Human Rights Report denounced the Bangladesh government over the latter's human rights violation, including killing and torture by security forces and their abuses responsible for disappearances and custodial deaths.
State Minister for Home Shamsul Haque Tuku, however, rejected the report terming it "baseless and motivated".
But civil society members support the US government report that said police, Border Guard Bangladesh and Rab at times used "unwarranted lethal force".
Contacted by The Daily Star, former police chief ASM Shahjahan Khan said, “If any extrajudicial killing takes place, it goes against the rule of law.”
An agency becomes morally weak when it faces criticisms from all quarters. So any allegation against any force should be probed and those guilty should be tried, said Shahjahan, also former adviser to a caretaker government.
In many cases the guilty personnel are not punished and there are many reasons behind it, he added.
He also advocated forming commissions within the forces to check the current culture of impunity.
No government uses the police force for public interest; it is used by the successive governments to serve their own interest, said Shahjahan, adding: “We didn't want police for the government but for the state.”
Advocate Sultana Kamal, executive director of rights body Ain O Salish Kendra, said the US Human Rights Report 2011 is an echo of what the ASK and other local rights bodies have been saying.
“In most cases, kidnappers in guise of Rab members are picking up people but the government fails to prove that the elite force is not involved with such incidents by arresting the 'real' kidnappers," she said.
It is government's responsibility to find any missing citizen, she added.
Contacted, State Minister for Home Tuku told The Daily Star over the phone yesterday, “One or two incidents [of human rights violation] took place, but we conducted probe into those incidents to ensure accountability of the law enforces.”
Earlier on Thursday, the junior minister rejected the report of Amnesty International, a London-based global rights body, which said extrajudicial killings in Bangladesh continued throughout 2011.
“An increasingly politicised judiciary exacerbated problems in an already overwhelmed judicial system and constrained access to justice for members of opposition parties,” said the US government report revealed by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in Washington on Thursday.