| Dhaka students were killed in 'shootout' Two youths killed in an alleged shootout with RAB in the wee hours of Thursday on Manik Mia Avenue have been identified as Dhaka Polytechnic Institute students by a friend who is also a student of the institute. Two youths killed in an alleged shootout with RAB Wednesday night have been identified as Dhaka Polytechnic Institute students by a friend who is also a student of the institute. The deceased were Mohsin Sheikh, 23, from fourth-year electrical engineering and Mohammad Ali Jinnah, 22, from third-year mechanical engineering departments.The bodies were identified on Thursday morning in the Dhaka Medical College Hospital morgue by Alif Hossain, a friend and student of the institute. Alif told bdnews24.com in the morning that after seeing the news of death of two youths in a 'gun battle' on the TV screen, he rushed to DMCH and identified the bodies.They all were hanging out together until 9:30pm on Wednesday, he said. The fresh killings have happened amid continued discussions on extrajudicial killings by the law enforcers and protests by the human-rights organisations at home and abroad, RAB-2 assistant police superintendent Talebur Rahman told bdnews24.com at 1:30am on Thursday that RAB troopers was carrying out search of vehicles by setting up a check-post at Asad Gate adjacent to Manik Mia Avenue on Wednesday night. At around 00:30am, two youths passing by aroused their suspicion and the RAB men asked them to halt. The challenged youths opened fire at them and RAB retaliated.As the 'shootout' ceased, the RAB personnel saw two dead bodies lying on the roadside. They searched the bodies and found two revolvers and ammunition.Mohammadpur police retrieved the two dead bodies and sent them to the DMCH morgue. Killings in so-called crossfire have being been widely criticised for years by the national and international rights organisations and countries.The government's spokesman minister Syed Ashraful Islam had said the government will no more allow the law-enforcing agencies to use "crossfire"— killings without trial—as a tool. Establishment of rule of law is a must for a democratic country and for that no extra-judicial killings will be allowed to be used as a tool of law-enforcing agencies.. The crossfire and extra-judicial killings are not related to general law. The law must be allowed to take its own course."A New York-based human-rights watchdog on May 18 recommended that the elite anticrime force be disbanded given its "long history of arbitrary arrests, torture, and extrajudicial killings". Over the past five years, the military, the and the police have been responsible for well over 1,000 killings, Human Rights Watch said in the report on Bangladesh. Human Rights Watch and others have long contended that many of these deaths, often described as "crossfire killings," were actually extrajudicial executions of people in custody. Bodies of the victims often had wounds that suggested that they had been tortured. |
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