This mini-project draws on the dataset behind Netra News’s Body Count investigation (2023). It focuses on people killed in targeted, extrajudicial executions—distinct from protest-related shootings or deaths in custody—and asks how many of those victims were identified as having a political affiliation or an alleged link to extremist groups. The pie chart below shows the breakdown by group; the table that follows provides the underlying records, descriptions and sources.

From 2009 through April 2022, during Sheikh Hasina’s rule, Netra News identified roughly 2,600 deaths involving law enforcement across three categories: targeted killings, lethal force used during protests, and custodial torture. About 2,000 of those were classified as “crossfire” killings or other targeted, premeditated killings. Among that subset, roughly 260 victims were affiliated with political parties or political and religious extremist groups; the rest were largely crime- or drug-related executions—what many Bangladeshis recognise as the classic pattern of extrajudicial killings.

The findings suggest that, contrary to popular belief, alleged leftist extremists—people reportedly linked to groups such as the Purba Bangla Sarbahara Party—were more affected during Hasina’s regime than political Islamists such as Jamaat-e-Islami or jihadist groups such as JMB combined, when it came to targeted killings. This dataset does not include the hundreds of extrajudicial killings that occurred under Khaleda Zia’s government from 2001 to 2006. If those years were added, the imbalance between alleged leftist extremists and politically affiliated victims would likely appear even more heavily skewed towards leftist groups.