DHAKA: Human rights group Amnesty International accused Bangladesh of unlawful killings by its special police force, urging the government to keep its promise of ending illegal executions.

The watchdog also called on countries to refrain from supplying arms to Bangladesh that can be used by the elite force.

Bangladesh’s Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) have killed at least 200 people since 2009, when the current government of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina took office, despite her pledge to end extrajudicial executions, the rights group said in a report.

“Hardly a week goes by in Bangladesh without someone being shot by RAB with the authorities saying they were killed or injured in ‘crossfire’ or a ‘gun-fight’,” said Abbas Faiz, Amnesty International’s Bangladesh researcher.

“However the authorities choose to describe such incidents, the fact remains that they are suspected unlawful killings.”

While the RAB justifies these killings as accidental or as a result of officers acting in self-defence, many victims are killed following their arrest, the watchdog said.

“The Bangladesh authorities must honour their pledge to stop extrajudicial executions by a special police force (RAB) accused of involvement in hundreds of killings,” the report said.

The RAB has been implicated in the killing of at least 700 people since its inception in 2004, the report said.

Any investigations into those killings have either been handled by the RAB or by a government-appointed judicial body, but details of their methodology or findings have remained secret, it added.

“It is appalling that virtually all alleged instances of illegal RAB killings have gone unchallenged or unpunished,” Faiz said.

“There can be no justice if the force is the chief investigator of its own wrongdoings... There is nothing to stop the RAB from destroying the evidence and engineering the outcome.”

Bangladesh’s police and the RAB continue to receive a wide range of military and police equipment from countries like Austria, Belgium, China, Czech Republic, Italy, Poland, Russia, Slovakia, Turkey and the United States, the group said.

The watchdog called on these countries to refrain from supplying arms to Bangladesh, which will be used by RAB and other security forces to commit illegal killings and other human rights violations.

“Any country that knowingly sends arms or other supplies to equip a force which systematically violates human rights may itself bear some responsibility for those violations.”