DHAKA, July 12 Bangladesh on Monday charged 824 people for the massacre of scores of senior army officers during a mutiny in February last year after the country's biggest criminal investigation, a prosecutor said.

Seventy-four people, including 57 senior army officers, were killed in a 33-hour siege at a military base in the capital Dhaka in an uprising that briefly threatened the new government of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina.

The accused, who will be tried in Bangladesh's civil courts, include the alleged ringleaders of the killing spree, which saw some officers tortured, set alight or gunned down in cold blood.

“We have charged 824 people with murder, conspiracy, aiding and abetting murder, looting military weapons and arson,” state prosecutor Mosharraf Hossain Kazal said, adding the trial would take at least one year to complete.

A number of mutilated bodies were discovered afterwards in shallow graves and sewers after the perpetrators fled in civilian clothes.

Each of the 824 suspects — 801 Bangladesh Rifles (BDR) soldiers and 23 civilians including a former opposition party lawmaker and a ruling party city councillor — has been charged with murder which carries the death penalty.

Police investigators on the civil case, the country's single largest criminal probe ever, have interviewed 9,500 border guards and civilians and have detained 2,307 people suspected of involvement.

In parallel prosecutions, an estimated 3,500 soldiers who joined the mutiny as it spread to some 40 border posts across the country are being tried in special military courts on lesser charges.

At least 200 guards have already been convicted in these courts with sentences ranging from one month to seven years in prison. The sentences cannot be appealed and defendants do not have lawyers.

The killings were premeditated, police investigator Abdul Kahhar Akhand said, and stemmed from pent-up anger among BDR soldiers over their superiors' refusal to increase their pay and improve working conditions.

“They mowed their officers down in cold blood, using semi-automatic weapons and rifles they'd looted from the barracks,” Akhand said of the mutineers, who took over the BDR headquarters on Feb 25, 2009.

The mutineers stole an estimated 2,500 weapons from the barracks, broke into an annual meeting of BDR officers, lined up the officers, including then-BDR head Major General Shakil Ahmed, and shot them at point blank range, he said.

Other officers stationed at the barracks, who were not in the immediate vicinity of the massacre, were hunted down by the mutineers and shot dead.

“One officer was hanged from a tree and then shot. A senior officer was taken to the roof of a four-storey building and thrown to the ground. The dead bodies of a few of the officers were set on fire,” Kazal said.

The mutineers are also accused of storming the house of the BDR chief and killing his wife, household staff and a number of guests, before making off with valuables including gold jewellery and setting fire to the building.

Investigators have ruled out the involvement of any of Bangladesh's main political parties, but more than 1,200 people will be called to testify, including government ministers and senior army officers, Kazal said.—AFP