Shaibal Das Sumon, a councillor from the then governing party, is among the 22 Awami League politicians and activists facing crimes against humanity charges over the deaths of three people in Chittagong city on 16 July 2024. According to the prosecution, he was at the scene, carrying a weapon and firing it. The charges accuse him, amongst others, of having “intentionally opened fire” on student demonstrators and unarmed members of the public.
This case is one of over a dozen prosecutions currently taking place at the International Crimes Tribunal (ICT) accusing Awami League politicians and law enforcement officers relating to either killings during the July 2024 protests that resulted in the fall of the prime minister Sheikh Hasina or in the previous 15 years when her party was in power.
Thousands of miles away
Yet in Sumon’s case, the prosecution faces a basic difficulty. Sumon’s passport places him far from Chittagong, on the other side of the world. It shows him leaving Bangladesh on 5 July, arriving in the United States the next day, and not coming back until 22 July, six days after the killings he is accused of taking part in. Ticketing records for his Turkish Airlines journey between Dhaka and New York’s JFK airport confirm the same dates.
“I had absolutely no presence or involvement near the locations where the incidents leading to these International Crimes Tribunal criminal cases allegedly took place,” Sumon told Daily Waadaa. “I was staying in the United States for business reasons from July 5, 2024, until July 22, 2024. I returned to Chittagong after July 22, 2024,” he added.
Sumon is not the only accused in these proceedings charged over events at which he was not present. Md Mohiuddin Bachchu, who formerly represented a Chittagong city constituency in parliament for the Awami League faces charges linked not only to the 16 July deaths but also to those of 18 July, when three more men were shot dead. Yet his passport, too, shows he was out of Bangladesh at the time. He departed on 13 July and did not come back until 25 July 2024. Both men were however present in Bangladesh on 4 August 2024 when they were also charged with offences, though no one was killed on that day.
Copy-and-paste testimony
The absence of two of the accused from the country is not the only problem with the Chittagong case. Human Rights Watch has found that, the tribunal’s prosecutors and judges are relying on witness testimonies recorded by investigating officers from which whole passages are duplicated word for word in multiple statements attributed to different witnesses, raising questions about their genuineness.
The human rights organisation stated that one six lines long passage – which asserts that seven named politicians used “Awami League terrorists” to kill several persons through their “planning, financing, provocation and instructions” – is repeated almost verbatim in fourteen different statements.
Then a second, lengthier passage turns up in near-identical form in another nine statements. According to this passage, six of the accused repeatedly made “provocative statements,” labelled the protesters “militants, terrorists, and communal agitators,” and directed the remaining sixteen accused to “use maximum force to suppress the movement and explicitly ordered the killing and torture of innocent, unarmed, peaceful students and the public.”
“Allegations based on duplicated witness statements … show the lack of a credible justice process, which will once again fail victims, their families, and all Bangladeshis,” said Meenakshi Ganguly, the deputy Asia director at Human Rights Watch.
Intrinsic weaknesses of the ICT law
ICT prosecutors have not responded to our questions asking why Sumon and Bacchu were charged with offences when they were not in the country, but in response to the claim of identical passages in multiple statements, the ICT chief prosecutor argued at a press conference that it was “natural” for the witnesses’ statements to be the same, and that “consistency is actually what is desirable.”
For critics, the Chittagong case is not an aberration. A growing number of observers suggest that politics has come to pervade many of the ICT prosecutions, with Awami League politicians swept into prosecutions whether or not there is sufficient evidence linking them to the alleged crimes.
“It’s easy for one side or another to claim a case is politically motivated” said Thom Dyke, a barrister at Deka Chambers, a lawyer for Fazle Karim Chowdhury, one of the accused in the case, who lays more blame at the architecture of the law and the restricted rights of the accused. “The real problem in Mr Chowdhury’s case is much more fundamental. The legislation which established the ICT has never complied with the basic standards required by international human rights law. Those charged are stripped of the constitutional rights otherwise afforded to all Bangladeshis. The law underpinning the ICT breaches obligations Bangladesh agreed to when it acceded to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights a quarter of a century ago.”
Journalists charged for asking questions
The problem does not just involve Awami League politicians, but also those who are closely aligned to the party. On 17 August 2026, ICT prosecutors asked the tribunal to arrest three senior journalists known for their sympathy towards the ousted Awami League – Mozammel Babu, Shyamal Dutta and Farzana Rupa – on crimes against humanity allegations. The allegations centre on the questions and remarks they made at a press conference given by Sheikh Hasina on 14 July 2024. The ICT duly agreed.
That press conference became a defining moment of the protests. It was there that Hasina appeared to equate the protesters with the “grandchildren of Razakars,” a term for those who collaborated with the Pakistan army during the 1971 war of independence. The remark drove students onto the streets in far greater numbers that same night, chanting slogans that turned the insult back on her.
Asked at a press conference why the journalists should be arrested, prosecutor Gazi Monawar Hossain Tamim said: “Holding press conferences, or asking questions at press conferences, is the duty of journalists. But during that period, we saw that certain journalists would attend the then prime minister’s press conferences, and the statements they made were not actually questions at all. They were praise of the then prime minister, and a kind of provocative instigation aimed at getting her to say certain things. That is why these offences were committed.”
Yet, Dutta asked no question at the press conference. And whilst Babu did ask a question, he spoke of the protesting students as “victims,” not as targets. Indeed, Hasina broke in to agree with him: “That’s exactly the case, there’s no reason to be mad at them, they go with the trend.” The question Rupa asked was the one on everyone’s mind: “Whether Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina will keep the quota or not keep the quota?” That was a perfectly ordinary question for a journalist to put to a head of government – when there were large scale protests of students against the 30 percent quota of civil service jobs that were given to relatives of those who fought in the country’s 1971 war.
“The use of an International Crimes Tribunal to prosecute journalists for their professional conduct sets an extremely disturbing precedent for press freedom in Bangladesh,” the Commonwealth Journalist Association said in response to the arrests. “Journalists must be held accountable for genuine criminal acts where credible evidence exists, but they cannot be criminalised simply for asking questions, reporting events or being perceived as politically sympathetic to one side or another.”
Prosecuting a polemic
If the journalists stand accused of prompting Hasina’s “razakar” remark, Muhammed Zafar Iqbal stands accused of echoing it. Widely regarded as Bangladesh’s leading writer of science fiction and children’s books, Iqbal is a former professor at Shahjalal University of Science and Technology and a prominent advocate of science education, who survived a knife attack by an Islamist militant on the university campus in March 2018. He now lives outside the country.
On 16 September 2026, prosecutors filed formal charges against Iqbal and seven others. The charges allege conspiracy, incitement, abetment and other inhumane acts linked to attacks on protesters in and around the Dhaka University campus. The tribunal accepted the charges on 20 September and issued a warrant for Iqbal and the others.
The case against him rests on an excerpt of an article, dated 14 July 2024, the day of Hasina’s press conference, which was circulated on social media: “Dhaka University is my university, my beloved university. But I think I will never want to go to this university again; whenever I see the students I will think, perhaps these are those razakars! …. And for as many days as I remain alive, I do not want to see the face of any razakar. There is only one life, after all — why, in that life, should I have to see razakars all over again?”
The prosecution’s case hinges on this passage. It also accuses him of refusing to support the protesters and of staying silent about the killings, neither of which is a crime. The piece is undoubtedly polemical: it implies that many of the students protesting at Dhaka University were, in effect, heirs to those who collaborated with the Pakistan army in 1971. But it does not call for, or even hint at, violence against anyone.
Charged for opposing Hefazet-e-Islam
Iqbal is not the only prominent supporter of the 1971 war crimes trials, and critic of Islamist politics, now facing prosecution at the same tribunal. On 27 July 2026, the ICT took cognisance of formal charges against 41 accused over a case that predates the July uprising by more than eleven years: the killings that followed a rally by the hardline Islamist group Hefazat-e-Islam at Shapla Chattar square in the centre of Dhaka on 5 May 2013.
Prosecutors say 58 people were killed in the cities of Dhaka, Narayanganj, Chittagong and Cumilla. The events took place more than eleven years before the protests that brought down Hasina’s government.
The 41 accused include two of the journalists cited above, Babu and Rupa, whose cases Justice Info has previously reported on. They also include civil society figures, one of whom is Shahriar Kabir, a longstanding critic of Islamist fundamentalism. He was a vocal supporter of the 1971 war crimes trials then under way at the ICT against those alleged to have collaborated with the Pakistan military. The prosecution alleges that Kabir “induced and instigated the government to commit the said crimes, and assisted it.”
Yet the only evidence predating the killings that is offered in support is a statement he reportedly gave to Deutsche Welle around a month earlier: “This country does not belong to the anti-independence war criminals; this country belongs to the spirit of the Liberation War. Jamaat and their ally Hefazat must be resisted. Even if the government compromises with the fundamentalist terrorists, the people of the country will not compromise.”
This is a clear political statement against political Islam.
Two days later, in fact, Hefazat brought its 13-point charter of demands to a mass rally in Dhaka. The demands included making “Islamic education mandatory from primary to higher secondary levels” and banning the “free-mixing of men and women and candlelit vigils,” as well as ending “adultery … shamelessness.” Saying that such demands should be resisted was hardly controversial, and it cannot plausibly form the basis of a prosecution for crimes against humanity.
“What’s happening with respect to these cases is nothing but revenge rather than justice for allegations of partisanship - lodged ironically under a similarly partisan consideration. The bad precedents being set at the ICT are not only tarnishing the credibility of the justice process in general and ICT in particular, but also in the end most likely to backfire sooner or later,” the executive director of the anti-corruption organisation Transparency International Bangladesh, Iftekaruzzman, told Justice Info.
Repeating failures of the past
There is an irony here that will not be lost on many Bangladeshis. Zafar Iqbal and Shahriar Kabir, as well as the three journalists, were amongst those who championed this very tribunal when it was trying those accused of collaborating with the Pakistan army in 1971, a process that was itself widely criticised for failing to meet fair trial standards. A decade on, the institution they earlier backed is being turned against them, with many of the same concerns: thin or non-existent evidence, politically driven charging decisions, and a court that rarely says no to the prosecution. The victims of July 2024, and Bangladesh itself, deserves accountability. Not another politicised tribunal repeating the failures of its past.
