Kalpana Chakma was 23 years old, an organising secretary for a hill women’s rights group in the Chittagong Hill Tracts, when armed men in military uniform dragged her from her home in Rangamati on the night of June 12, 1996. Her brothers, who witnessed the abduction, identified the officer in charge. Thirty years later, she has never been found, and no one has ever been convicted.
Her name sits near the top of a registry that now runs to hundreds of entries — a case-by-case accounting of Bangladeshis who walked out of their homes, offices, or off the street and never came back the same. Compiled from the records of the government’s own Commission of Inquiry on Enforced Disappearances, the UN Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances, and rights monitors including Odhikar, Ain o Salish Kendra (ASK), Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, the registry is the most complete public accounting yet of a practice that has shadowed Bangladesh since its earliest years of independence — and that reached its most systematic form in the decade before the mass uprising of 2024.
A practice with four distinct eras:
Rights investigators and the Commission of Inquiry divide the modern history of disappearances in Bangladesh into four broad periods, each with its own apparatus:
- 1972–1975, the post-independence period, when the paramilitary Jatiya Rakkhi Bahini and Special Police carried out detentions and executions targeting leftist dissidents from groups such as Purba Banglar Sarbahara Party and opposition members of the Jatiyo Samajtantrik Dal (JSD).
- 1975–1990, the years of military rule under Ziaur Rahman and Hussain Muhammad Ershad, when the newly formed Directorate General of Forces Intelligence (DGFI), military police and armed forces conducted martial-law executions, clandestine detentions, and counter-insurgency operations against indigenous activists in the Chittagong Hill Tracts.
- 1991–2008, the transition to democracy, a period investigators associate with the emergence of the Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) — formed in 2004 — and with “Operation Clean Heart” (2002–03), during which dozens of custodial deaths were documented and the term “crossfire” entered the political lexicon as a euphemism for extrajudicial killing.
- 2009–August 2024, the Awami League government under Sheikh Hasina, which the Commission of Inquiry and international monitors describe as the period in which disappearances became most systematic — coordinated across RAB, DGFI, the Detective Branch (DB) of police, and the Counter Terrorism and Transnational Crime unit (CTTC), and targeted increasingly at opposition politicians, students and dissidents rather than only criminal suspects.
A fifth, much shorter period — August 2024 to the present — covers the interim era that followed Hasina’s government, during which the Commission of Inquiry has pushed to document the earlier decades and pursue prosecutions.
The numbers:
According to the Commission of Inquiry’s 2024–2025 findings, more than 1,837 formal complaints of enforced disappearance have been lodged with the state body, covering an estimated 3,500-plus victims. Of the long-term “still missing” cases the Commission has been able to confirm, roughly 345 individuals remain untraced. Independent investigative outlet Netra News has separately documented 709 cases in its “Secret Prisoners of Dhaka” project, naming 22 secret detention cells and 22 individuals it identifies as commanders bearing responsibility.
The annual pattern tracked in the registry — drawing on Mayer Daak (Mothers’ Call, the platform founded by families of the disappeared), Odhikar and Daily Star reporting — shows the practice climbing sharply from 18 documented disappearances in 2010 to a peak of 113 in 2013, the year of the pre-election crackdown on opposition activists in Dhaka, and remaining elevated through the following decade, with 97 cases recorded in 2016 and 98 in 2018.
The Commission’s breakdown of victims by political affiliation gives a sense of who was targeted: it found that roughly 68% of confirmed permanent-traceless victims were affiliated with the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), while about 13% were linked to Jamaat-e-Islami and its student wing, Islami Chhatra Shibir, and a further group belonged to Jatiyatabadi Chhatra Dal, the BNP’s student wing. Journalists, indigenous rights defenders, and civil society figures make up a smaller but recurring share of cases across the period, particularly from 2017 onward.
The mechanism: from pickup to “Aynaghor”:
The registry’s case-by-case entries describe a broadly consistent pattern across hundreds of files: victims were taken by plainclothes officers, often identifying themselves as DB police, RAB, or National Security Intelligence (NSI), frequently in unmarked vehicles or microbuses, sometimes with visible RAB insignia, sometimes deliberately unmarked to preserve deniability. Families report being unable to file a First Information Report (FIR) with police, who in many recorded cases refused to acknowledge the detention at all.
Detainees were held, according to survivor testimony gathered by the Commission and by Netra News, in a network of unofficial facilities — secret cells inside RAB and DGFI compounds, joint interrogation cells, and above all a complex that came to be known publicly, after its exposure in 2024, as Aynaghor (“house of mirrors”). Survivors who were “produced” — released back into the formal justice system, sometimes years later — have given the Commission detailed, consistent descriptions of blindfolded detention, soundproofed cells, and prolonged secret interrogation.
Two of the best-documented survivor accounts in the registry involve Abdullahi Aman Azmi, son of a former army chief, and Mir Ahmad Bin Quasem, a barrister, both of whom were released blindfolded on August 5, 2024 — the day Hasina’s government fell — after roughly 1,947 days, more than five years, in secret detention. Both have since given extensive testimony to the Commission of Inquiry about conditions inside the facility. Michael Chakma, an indigenous rights leader who disappeared in 2019 and was similarly held for years, filed a formal criminal case against DGFI officers in 2024 after his release.
Not everyone survived. The registry records extrajudicial killings dating back to Siraj Sikder, the Sarbahara Party leader killed in secret police custody in January 1975, through to the 2014 Narayanganj Seven Murder case, in which RAB-11 officers under the command of Tareq Sayeed abducted and killed a local Awami League politician and six associates, dumping their bodies, weighted with bricks, in the Shitalakshya River. A Bangladesh High Court subsequently sentenced 26 individuals, including 16 RAB officers, to death over the killings — one of the rare instances in which the state secured convictions in a disappearance-linked case.
The 2024 uprising and its aftermath:
The registry shows a marked shift in the character of disappearances in the run-up to and during the mass protest movement that toppled the Hasina government. Cases from 2024 recorded in the registry describe the pre-election abduction of Dhaka City Corporation councillor Ilias Ali associates, the targeting of digital rights and internet-freedom activists such as Shafiqul Islam Kajol during the pandemic-era blockade, and, during the July uprising itself, the mass detention of student coordinators — several of whom were later confirmed to have been held incommunicado at DGFI headquarters and coerced into recording videos calling off the protests.
Since the government’s fall, accountability efforts have moved on several fronts simultaneously, according to the registry’s legal-tracking section:
- The Commission of Inquiry on Enforced Disappearances, headed by Justice Moyeenul Islam Chowdhury, has continued taking testimony and cross-referencing cases against the international “Where No Sun Can Enter” framework published by Human Rights Watch.
- The International Crimes Tribunal (ICT), established under a 1973 law amended in 2024, has begun accepting enforced-disappearance and torture cases as crimes against humanity, with proceedings against senior RAB and DGFI commanders opened in 2024–2025.
- The United States imposed Global Magnitsky sanctions on RAB as an institution and on seven of its top commanders beginning in December 2021, citing gross human rights abuses; those sanctions have remained a reference point for subsequent domestic prosecutions.
- Police in the Criminal Investigation Department have opened their own inquiries into command responsibility, and rights bodies have petitioned the interim government to reopen historic cases — including Kalpana Chakma’s — under an independent tribunal.
The Commission’s institutional findings assign the largest share of command responsibility across the full 2009–2024 period to an executive command chain running through the former prime minister and senior security advisers, with RAB, DGFI’s Detective Branch equivalent, and the DB/CTTC identified as the primary implementing agencies — a finding that international monitors, including the UN Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances (WGEID) and Amnesty International, have said is broadly consistent with their own independent documentation.
What the record still can’t answer:
For all the volume of new documentation compiled since 2024, most of the human toll in the registry remains unresolved. Of the total historical caseload, the Commission’s figures show 164 people found dead or extrajudicially killed, 322 surfaced or released alive, 188 produced in court, and 109 still missing or unaccounted for in the 2024 findings alone — on top of untold numbers from the earlier military and post-independence eras that are unlikely ever to be fully reconstructed.
Families organised under Mayer Daak have continued to hold monthly protests in Dhaka demanding a full accounting, and the Chakma family — whose daughter Kalpana disappeared three decades ago in Rangamati — say they still receive no answers from the state about who ordered the operation that took her.
This feature draws on the government Commission of Inquiry on Enforced Disappearances, the UN Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, Odhikar, Ain o Salish Kendra, Netra News, Mayer Daak, and contemporaneous reporting by Bangladeshi and international outlets, as compiled in a master case registry. Individual allegations attributed to the Commission of Inquiry, rights organisations, or named survivors reflect their findings and testimony; agencies and individuals implicated have not been shown in this piece to have responded to specific allegations, and matters before the International Crimes Tribunal remain subject to due process.
By Abir Bin Jabed
