DHAKA: A Bangladeshi court sentenced 26 people, including 16 members of the country’s elite anti-terrorism force, to death on Monday. They were charged with killing political rivals of a former member of the ruling Awami League.

The ruling was the first time that members of the Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) had been handed the death penalty, Shakhawat Hossain Khan, a lawyer for the victims, told reporters.

Tarek Sayeed, the battalion’s commander and son-in-law of a minister in Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s government, was among those sentenced to hang for the abduction and murder of seven people in Narayanganj in 2014.

“We are happy with the verdict,” Hossain said outside the court in Narayanganj, following a trial that shocked the nation of 160 million people.

Lawyers for the defendants said they would appeal the verdict in the high court.

International human rights groups have accused Bangladeshi security forces of carrying out extrajudicial killings, abductions and detention of suspects without charge.

Opposition parties also say hundreds of their activists have disappeared during Sheikh Hasina’s eight-year rule. The government says it was not behind the disappearances, and denies that security forces were involved.

The court found all 35 defendants in the trial guilty of involvement in the murder of seven people after they were kidnapped outside a cricket stadium in Narayanganj in April 2014. Nine of the 35 were given prison sentences.

Witnesses reported seeing the victims being bundled into an unmarked van. The victims’ bodies, their bellies slashed, were later found floating in a river.

According to the court, politician Nur Hossain, at the time a member of Hasina’s Awami League, paid RAB members to kill a political rival and four of his aides.

A lawyer who filmed the abductions and his driver were also kidnapped and then killed.

Twenty-three of those convicted were in court, while 12 remain at large.

Published in Dawn, January 17th, 2017