The government should form a commission to find out what stirred the mutiny of the erstwhile Bangladesh Rifles or BDR that saw 74 people, including 57 army officials, killed at the paramilitary force’s Peelkhana headquarters in Dhaka a decade ago, the High Court has said.
In the full verdict upholding death sentence of an unprecedented 139 people, the court says the government can take measures if it considers it necessary to unmask the quarter with vested interests behind the mutiny.
General and novice soldiers rebelled on Feb 25 and 26 in 2009 having been misled by some ambitious members of Bangladesh Rifles and upon instigation and provocation by a quarter with vested interests, Justice Md Abu Zafor Siddique observed in the full verdict published on Wednesday.
The judges also spoke against the “Operation Dal-Bhat”, a programme in which BDR personnel had been tasked with operating superstores, in a disciplined force. Such schemes with financial transactions and accounts of profit and loss create possibilities of unnecessary division and moral lapse, they observed.
“Operation Dal-Bhat is a good example of this,” they said.
The panel of three judges, led by Justice Md Shawkat Hossain who is retiring on Thursday, made 22 recommendations in the verdict written on 29,059 pages. The other judge of the larger bench is Md Nazrul Islam Talukder.
They issued the summary verdict on Nov 26 and 27 in 2016 after hearing the death references and appeals against the trial court’s verdict. The High Court also sentenced 185 convicts to life in prison and announced various prison terms for 228 others. A total of 288 people were acquitted. The remaining six, out of the 846 people who were tried in the trial court, died.
The judges said they weighed the stance of different countries and human rights organisations against death penalty while upholding the capital punishment of 139.
“Army officers were killed with gunshots or bayonet charge. Their bodies were burnt, buried en masse to destroy evidence. It is proper to hand death penalty to those involved with these brutal and barbaric killings so that no one can gather the courage to do this in future,” they said in the verdict.
After the mutiny, some suggested deeper conspiracies behind the rebellion, but police investigators concluded that the BDR personnel’s grievances led them to revolt.
The trial court, in its verdict, observed that the mutiny was orchestrated with the motive to destroy the military security system and might have been engineered to weaken the economy.
It also said involving the border guards in market activities like “Operation Dal-Bhat”, introduced by a caretaker government, was “unwise”. The court believed there were intelligence “deficiencies” that held back critical information of a brewing mutiny.
