Shapla Chattar – a square in the business and financial district of Dhaka, Bangladesh's capital – is now the site of a high-profile case before Bangladesh's International Crimes Tribunal (ICT), where 41 people have been formally charged with crimes against humanity over the May 5, 2013 night crackdown on Hefazat-e-Islam, a religiously conservative advocacy group, when Sheikh Hasina was the country’s leader.
Hefazat is an organization rooted largely in Qawmi madrasa networks – comprising thousands of institutions across Bangladesh – headed by religious scholars and attended by millions of students. It has presented itself as a movement defending Islamic values and opposing what it regards as atheism, secularism, and foreign cultural influence.
After Sheikh Hasina's fall in August 2024, Hefazat re-emerged after years of suppression as an influential pressure group, aiming to be a leading voice in national affairs while continuing to refuse to contest elections as an official political party. Its power instead derives from mass street mobilization and its ability to extract concessions from whichever government holds office.
The 2013 escalation
Bangladesh entered 2013 amid deep political volatility, with poverty and corruption still widespread and a national election due in January 2014. A constitutional provision for a non-partisan caretaker government to oversee elections, introduced in 1996, was struck down by the Supreme Court in 2011 and formally abolished by Parliament later that year – a move critics saw as a step toward autocracy. This left Sheikh Hasina’s Awami League and the Bangladesh National Party (BNP) locked in a standing dispute well before campaigning began, with the BNP warning it would boycott any election held without a restored caretaker system. But it was a second front – Islamist far-right Jamaat-e-Islami's opposition to the war crimes tribunal (ICT) created by Hasina to prosecute them for 1971 killings – that actually drove the unrest of spring 2013. Burning buses, hartals, and mob violence became routine in Dhaka months before, paced by tribunal verdicts against Jamaat leaders.
The Shahbagh movement – key to understanding the later Shapla Chattar crackdown – began in Dhaka on February 5, 2013, after the ICT sentenced Jamaat-e-Islami leader Abdul Quader Mollah to life imprisonment. Protesters, angered by what they viewed as a lenient sentence, demanded the death penalty and called for Jamaat-e-Islami to be banned. The movement was initially organized by bloggers and online activists and drew broad support from secular activists, young people, and the broader liberal public. Tensions escalated when religious groups, led by Hefazat-e-Islam, accused Shahbagh participants of insulting Islam and demanded capital punishment for the movement's leaders. On February 15, secular blogger Ahmed Rajib Haider was hacked to death in the streets of Dhaka near his home. On February 28, the ICT sentenced Jamaat-e-Islami vice-president Delwar Hossain Sayedee to death, deepening the political crisis. Jamaat enforced nationwide strikes and violent protests. By March, Bangladesh was experiencing daily confrontations between government supporters, opposition activists, Jamaat loyalists, and security forces.
A list of targets
In March, the government itself formed a committee that received, from representatives of conservative Muslim clerics, a compiled list of 84 bloggers accused of atheism. In April, police arrested four bloggers – including Asif Mohiuddin, who had survived a near-fatal machete attack outside his office in January 2013 because he had written critically of religion and religious politics predating the protests – on charges of hurting religious sentiment. Human rights organizations condemned the arrests as a crackdown on free expression. The killing of Rajib Haider would prove to be the first in a much longer pattern. Over the following three years, a series of secular writers, bloggers, and publishers – many of whose names had appeared on the same 2013 list of 84 atheist bloggers compiled by Islamist clerics – were murdered by machete-wielding assailants.
On April 6, Hefazat organized a massive "long march" to Dhaka and announced a 13-point charter. Its demands included the execution of individuals accused of insulting Islam, an anti-blasphemy law, action against Shahbagh bloggers, restrictions on public mixing of men and women, and greater protections for religious scholars. Hefazat warned that it would lay siege to Dhaka if the government failed to comply.
Prime Minister Hasina's government refused to introduce a new blasphemy law, arguing that existing statutes were sufficient to punish offenses and protect religious sentiment. It did, however, have grounds to claim it was already acting against the bloggers Hefazat wanted targeted: the arrests earlier that month, ostensibly triggered by the clerics' list submitted to the government committee, now doubled as a de facto concession to the march's demands. At the same time, authorities portrayed Hefazat's planned mobilization as a direct threat to public order and Bangladesh's constitutional commitment to secular democracy and refused to comply with the 13 point charter.
The night at Shapla Chattar
Hefazat mobilized hundreds of thousands of supporters from across Bangladesh. On the morning of May 5, demonstrators entered Dhaka through several entry points as part of a blockade the organization termed the "siege of Dhaka". Everyday life and traffic came to a halt as severe clashes were reported across the capital. By afternoon, vast crowds converged to Shapla Chattar, where leaders delivered hours of speeches demanding implementation of their 13-point charter, with some invoking violent religious rhetoric against 'atheist bloggers' and calling on youth to ‘sacrifice themselves for the cause’. While Hefazat leaders insisted their gathering was peaceful, Human Rights Watch documented clashes and widespread property destruction involving some protesters, including arson attacks on shops, office buildings, and public buses, leaving workers in the business and financial district fearing for their safety. Government officials declared the occupation an intolerable threat to public safety and commercial life.
Later that evening, authorities ordered demonstrators to clear the area. When the occupation persisted, police, the Rapid Action Battalion, and Border Guard Bangladesh launched a joint night operation at approximately 2:30 AM on May 6 to clear the square.
"That day, a new Karbala was created at Shapla Chattar," told us Azizul Hoque Islamabadi, Hefazat's joint secretary and assistant secretary general of the Bangladesh Nezam-e-Islam Party. "No civilized state treats its citizens this way. To suppress the movement, the electricity supply was cut off. Those present had their water and food supplies blocked. The movement was suppressed through fascist-style brutality inflicted upon innocent, hungry people and madrasa students. Not even the slightest respect was shown for basic human rights. We demand of the new Bangladesh that those who committed crimes against humanity by so brutally suppressing this movement be brought to justice, ensuring fairness and accountability."
A disputed death toll
The precise number of protesters present when the night operation began remains unverified, and the death toll remains intensely contested – a dispute the Hasina government actively shaped through legal retaliation against those who challenged its official count.
Odhikar, a local human rights organization, published a 2013 fact-finding report on the Shapla Chattar crackdown claiming 61 deaths. The government disputed the figure, putting the toll at 13. Rather than contest the report on its merits, authorities accused Odhikar of circulating distorted information and doctored images, and prosecuted the organization's secretary, Adilur Rahman Khan, and director, ASM Nasiruddin Elan. After more than a decade of legal proceedings, both were convicted in September 2023 and sentenced to two years in prison. A month later, in October 2023, both were released on bail. Human Rights Watch called the prosecution "retaliation" for Odhikar's documentation of the crackdown.
Human Rights Watch’s own original 2013 investigation estimated that at least 58 people died during the events of May 5 and 6, including seven members of the security forces – a figure now used by the ICT Chief Prosecutor's Office in its filings.
To date, no court has independently verified those competing figures – verification that remains essential to a transparent, credible, and victim-centered judicial process.
Same charge for all
Today’s 41-person indictment reaches far beyond the security officials accused of ordering and carrying out the Shapla Chattar operation. It sweeps together military and police commanders, cabinet ministers, civil servants, a student leader, the former prime minister Sheikh Hasina, journalists, and two prominent civil-society campaigners into a single charge of crimes against humanity.
Among those indicted are Farzana Rupa and Mozammel Babu, former journalists at Ekattor TV, charged for crimes against humanity over an investigative documentary aired months after the operation. In the report, Rupa investigated the events of May 5-6, arguing that arson, book burning, and looting were perpetrated by groups within the rally, that police primarily deployed non-lethal rubber rounds, and that death counts circulated by partisan outlets and human rights groups were inflated. While the documentary can be viewed as state-aligned PR framed as journalism, it does not explain a crime against humanity charge under international law.
Shahriar Kabir, a veteran campaigner against religious fundamentalism, and Imran H. Sarker, spokesperson for the Shahbagh movement, face a related theory: that their public speeches before and after the events spread false information and encouraged the operation which led to crimes against humanity charges.
The mechanism theory
The prosecution's legal rationale for bridging this gap became clear during a press conference on May 14, 2026, when Chief Prosecutor Md. Aminul Islam addressed why media figures were being drawn into the ICT case. Explaining Rupa's inclusion, Islam stated: "The allegation currently found against her is that she was involved in this plan - that regarding the event that took place at Shapla Chattar, she was involved in this total mechanism from beforehand... Her involvement in that mechanism later became clearly evident through her report."
Through this framing, the state transforms post-facto television reporting into retroactive evidence of prior conspiracy. Rather than proving she participated in physical violence, command decisions or direct calls for violence on the night of May 5, the prosecution asserts her investigative documentary – aired months later – was itself part of a pre-planned "mechanism" to execute and cover up the crackdown.
Yet Hefazat's own rationale for including journalists is narrower and more pragmatic than the prosecution's sweeping theory. "We did not file a case against Farzana Rupa and Mozammel Babu. The investigating agency found evidence of their involvement and therefore we demand their punishment. Whether the officials who cut off power and authorized the use of force that night, and the media figures who aired biased or disputed reporting in the following months, should face the same 'crimes against humanity' charges as those involved in physical violence, is now a matter for the court to determine," Islamabadi told us.
The person steering this prosecution raises questions about political neutrality. Chief Prosecutor Md. Aminul Islam, appointed in February 2026, is himself a senior BNP leader. He replaced Tajul Islam, who was perceived as close to Jamaat-e-Islami and appointed under the 2024 interim government.
A call for due process
Though mass mobilizations that blockade a capital city occupy contested legal ground in many democracies – where indefinitely disrupting a city's basic functioning is treated as incompatible with the rule of law, not merely as protected protest – Hefazat's grievance is real, and the lives lost that night deserve a credible, impartial accounting, both for Hefazat's losses and for the security officers who died during the crackdown.
The formal charge sheet runs to over 200 pages. Rather than focusing strictly on the specific chain of command and rules of engagement applied on May 5-6, 2013, much of the document recounts five decades of Awami League political history – from 1970s paramilitary organizations to a 1974 famine, disputed elections, and enforced disappearances under Hasina's later rule – arguing that her government was broadly "fascist". Bundling military officers, cabinet ministers, journalists, and civic activists into a single overarching indictment framed around five decades of partisan history risks turning a judicial proceeding into a flawed historical trial.
Prime Minister Tarique Rahman has repeatedly stated since taking office in February 2026 that "democracy cannot survive without the rule of law" and that "justice must be impartial and applied equally, whatever a person's position or party." His government's prosecutor is now testing that pledge.
A prosecution built on an overextended legal theory risks handing future administrations a precedent to reverse verdicts on procedural grounds, while giving the international community reason to view the proceedings less as impartial justice than as political retaliation. Further, it – once again – manipulates history by not establishing the facts but selling a story already written.
Julia Wesemann is an international development practitioner and NGO director based in Dhaka working on private sector development, civic participation, climate justice and community-led development. Her work focuses on strengthening the rights and agency of communities affected by social and environmental inequalities, including through advocacy at the intersection of technology, development and human rights.
Shahnewaj Patwari is a Bangladeshi human rights lawyer and technology-policy researcher with over 14 years of experience across law, governance, policy reform and advocacy. A Supreme Court advocate, he works at the intersection of human rights, digital rights, AI governance, freedom of expression and civic space, with additional expertise in public health law. His work spans Bangladesh and the wider South Asian region, where he focuses on legal and policy reform to protect fundamental freedoms in an increasingly digital public sphere.
