The student-led Monsoon Revolution under the banner of ‘Students Against Discrimination’ succeeded in toppling Hasina’s 16-year regime, propelled by fervent demands for change and accountability.
The chief adviser’s press wing had claimed the commission also found the involvement of the deposed prime minister’s now absconding defence adviser, retired major general Tarique Ahmed Siddique, a now sacked major general and two senior police officers and several other senior officials in the cases of enforced disappearance.
The news report said that the police’s elite anti-crime Rapid Action Battalion (RAB), which draws men from army, navy, air force and regular police and other law enforcement agencies had collaborated with each other to pick up, torture and keep victims in detention.
The commission simultaneously proposed the abolition of the RAB alongside scrapping or thoroughly amending the Anti-Terrorism Act, 2009.
Commission member and rights activist Sajjad Hossain had said that they recorded 1,676 complaints of enforced disappearances and so far examined 758, of which 200 people or 27 per cent of the victims never returned while those who returned were mostly shown on record as arrested.
At a press conference earlier, the commission announced that they had found eight secret detention centres in Dhaka and on its outskirts.
The commission chairman had informed Yunus that they would deliver another interim report in March and would require at least another year to complete the scrutiny of all allegations they had received.
