‘She’s the one who shattered us’: families of slain Bangladesh students wantk to hold Sheikh Hasina to account

She may not have fired the gun but Mahabubar Rahman knows who killed Shoikot, his beloved only son. “Sheikh Hasina is the criminal responsible for his death,” he said. “She is the one who has shattered us.”

Bangladesh’s former prime minister fled the country last month , bringing her 15-year regime, dominated by allegations of tyranny, violence and corruption, to a dramatic end. While Hasina was accused of countless human rights abuses during her tenure, nothing would compare with what took place in the last weeks of July and early August, as she desperately clung to power at the cost of more than 1,000 lives.

The protest movement that instigated her unexpected downfall began small, as student protests on campuses . But Hasina, notoriously intolerant of dissent, was rattled; in response, she authorised a campaign of terror and vengeance led by the most feared battalions of police and paramilitary . Protesters were met with batons, tear gas, rubber bullets, metal pellets, beatings, mass arrests, judicial torture and eventually live ammunition, sometimes fired from helicopters. Yet as the crackdown intensified and more bodies lay in the streets, the movement swelled into an all-out revolution.

On 5 August, as almost 1 million people began to defy police barricades and an onslaught of tear gas to march towards the prime minister’s residence in the capital, Dhaka, the army chief refused to issue orders for a massacre of civilians. Instead, he gave Hasina an ultimatum: leave now or likely be killed at the hands of the masses. She jumped on a helicopter with her sister and fled over the border to India, where she still remains.

With Bangladesh now run by an interim government, led by Muhammad Yunus , the Nobel prize-winning economist and former political rival of Hasina, it has since become clear this was one of the bloodiest chapters in Bangladesh’s history. Last week, the death toll was finally confirmed to be more than 1,000 people , while about 400 protesters lost their sight in at least one eye from the police pellet firing.

Many, like Rahman and his family, are determined to fight for justice for the deaths of their loved ones. They are among more than 100 families who have been emboldened to file police cases directly naming Hasina, her top ministers, senior police commissioners and officers as the accused responsible, citing the whole chain of command as culpable. Video footage collected from that day clearly shows armed police firing live ammunition at protesters at the spot where his son was slain, and bullets were found lodged in the walls.

“Previously filing a case was pointless – how can you ask for justice from the killers?” said Rahman. “Now I have hope. But it will never make up for what she took from us.”

Mahamudur Rahman Shoikot was never meant to join the protests in Dhaka. The 19-year-old student, described as the baby of the family, was doted on almost overbearingly by his elder sisters and his parents, who all called him Tuna and rarely let him leave their side.

His sister, Sabrina Afroz Sabonti, 22, bought him his first bicycle and baked him cakes. She said she had cried for a week when she found out he had made a Facebook profile, fearing his innocence would be lost.

“He was so tall and so beautiful, we loved him so much,” said Sabonti.

As the protests began to erupt in Dhaka, his mother firmly banned him from taking part. Yet Shoikot was furious, secretly ranting on social media that he felt like a coward stuck inside, while his brothers and sisters were dying on the streets, fighting to be free.

On 19 July, he shut up his father’s sweet yoghurt shop and told his mother, who was deep in her prayers, he was briefly going out. He never came home.

As their Dhaka neighbourhood became a war zone, thick with smoke, acrid tear gas, the sounds of police firing guns and people screaming, Shoikot’s family desperately tried to reach him on the phone. Finally, a stranger picked up and delivered devastation to his father. This boy has been shot dead, he said, go straight to the hospital or you won’t even get the body back.

Sabonti, knowing only that her brother had been hit with a bullet, arrived at the hospital, screaming down the corridor, “Is he alive, is he alive?”. But as they took her not to the medical ward but the morgue, she moaned in despair.

There was Shoikot, cold and still and covered in blood from a gunshot wound to his head. Other bodies hit with bullets in their heads and chest lay by his side. “It was a shot to kill, nothing else,” she said. The morgue door was shut before she had a chance to touch him for a final time.

After hours spent navigating the dangers of Dhaka’s streets to get home, she finally delivered the news to her mother, who, engulfed in grief, ran outside to the streets, screaming amid the sound of gunfire: “Whoever killed my son, kill me too. I don’t want to live.”

A nationwide curfew meant they could only bury him the next day. From then, until 5 August, the terrified family locked themselves inside their apartment, never leaving even as police were going door-to-door ransacking houses as they searched for students.

The day the news broke that Hasina had fled, millions began to flood the streets in jubilation and many flocked to run riot over Hasina’s Dhaka residence. But for Sabonti and her father, they headed in the other direction. “It was the first time we could visit the graveyard,” she said. “We were all crying, but as we stood over my brother’s grave we could finally tell him, ‘Now it’s OK, now we are free’.”

Yet even with Hasina gone, the pursuit of justice has been complex. For weeks the hospital doctors refused to write gunshot on Shoikot’s death certificate, and the police initially refused to register their case. Many other families of those who died in the protests still haven’t got the bodies back after they were disposed of en masse by the police.

[Before Sheikh Hasina went] filing a case was pointless – how can you ask for justice from the killers?

Mahabubar Rahman

The prospect of Hasina returning to face justice in Bangladesh is also uncertain. While Yunus pledged last week that Hasina “has to be brought back to face trial”, she remains in India where analysts say her close relationship with the government makes her extradition unlikely. While it is reported Hasina has requested asylum in the UK, which is where her son lives, experts say it is very unlikely to be granted given the mounting criminal cases against her, including for crimes against humanity.

For many in Bangladesh, the country’s weakened judicial system – which lost all semblance of independence under Hasina – is not even fit for purpose to put her on trial and instead many believe it will be a case only suitable for the international courts. “We must try her for crimes but it is not possible to hold her accountable in domestic courts,” said Zahed Ur Rahman, a political analyst. “The international criminal court is our only hope.”

Sabonti is willing to wait years to claim justice for her brother’s death. While her mother still weeps in her arms at home every morning, her father refuses to break down in front of his family. Instead, she watches him on the CCTV as he sobs quietly in his shop all day.