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DHAKA: Nearly 300 people have been killed in political violence in Bangladesh in the year since student-led protests toppled autocratic former leader Sheikh Hasina, the country’s main human rights group said on Sunday.
A report by Odhikar, a Dhaka-based rights organization, said at least 281 people had been killed in violence involving political parties from August 2024, when Hasina’s rule ended and she fled to India, to September 2025.
On top of those, there were another 40 victims of extrajudicial killings who had been suspected of crimes, while another 153 were lynched, the quarterly report released last week said.
Odhikar director ASM Nasiruddin Elan said adherence to human rights had improved since the fall of Hasina’s government but law enforcement agencies were still not being held accountable.
“Yes, we don’t see the frequent extrajudicial killings or enforced disappearances that we witnessed during the Hasina era, but deaths in custody, bribery, and harassment of victims are still ongoing,” Elan said.
He said that “innocent people fall prey to atrocities” for their alleged involvement with the Awami League, Hasina’s political party that is now banned.
Hasina’s 15-year rule saw widespread human rights abuses, including the mass detention and extrajudicial killing of her political opponents.
The Odhikar report also said many people had fallen victim to extortion by political parties, regardless of their financial or social standing, in the year since Hasina’s fall.
Those included the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, seen as the frontrunner in elections slated for February 2026, and the Anti-Discrimination Student Movement, which was credited with starting the protests that toppled Hasina.
Jamaat-e-Islami, Muslim-majority Bangladesh’s largest Islamist party, was also included in reports of extortion, the report said.
Odhikar also said mob attacks had been relatively frequent during the period, mainly because of inefficient policing.
“Police have been used to achieve party interests and were given impunity, which eventually led them to kill and torture activists affiliated with the opposition,” the report said.
It said “the police largely became dysfunctional and lost their morale,” after Hasina fell.
Bangladesh’s interim government nor any of the political parties have responded yet to Odhikar’s report.

Nearly 60,000 people were deprived of power supply after Russia’s overnight air attack on Ukraine’s frontline region of Zaporizhzhia, while two people were killed in the southern region of Odesa, Ukrainian authorities said on Sunday.
As winter nears, Russia has stepped up missile and drone strikes on Ukraine’s power grid, triggering outages and forcing Kyiv’s emergency crews to race to repair damage and manage rolling blackouts.
The attack on Zaporizhzhia left two people wounded and reduced buildings to rubble, the regional governor, Ivan Federov, said on the Telegram messaging app.
“Crews will restore power as soon as the security situation allows,” Fedorov said on Telegram, where he posted nighttime photographs of buildings with facades and windows torn off.
Zaporizhzhia endures near-daily Russian artillery, missile and drone strikes that have destroyed homes, crippled utilities and killed scores, as Moscow pressures Ukraine’s defenses and disrupts links between its south and the rest of the country.
Fedorov said the overnight attack wounded two people. Russia’s 800 strikes on 18 settlements in the region killed one person and injured three over the 24 hours into Sunday morning, he added.
Two people died as a result of Russia’s overnight drone attack on Odesa on Ukraine’s Black Sea coast, Ukraine’s state emergency service said on Telegram.
Separately, the death toll from a Russian air attack that set ablaze a shop in the Dnipropetrovsk region on Saturday has risen to four and includes two boys aged 11 and 14, the region’s acting governor said.
There was no immediate comment from Russia about the attacks.
Both sides deny targeting civilians in the war that Russia launched with a full-scale invasion on Ukraine in 2022, but thousands have been killed in the conflict, the vast majority of them Ukrainian.