প্রকাশিত: জানুয়ারি ২, ২০২২, ০৯:৫৯ পিএম
Foreign Minister AK Abdul Momen through a letter, requested
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken to review the US decision to impose
sanctions on Rapid Action Battalion and seven current and former top officials
of the agency, including current Inspector General of Police Benazir Ahmed. In
the letter, Momen also conveyed new year greetings to the USA, the Ministry of Foreign
Affairs stated.
Relevant to the matter, on December 10, the United States
imposed the sanctions on the Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) and seven high ranked
officials including the current Inspector-General of Police and a former
Director-General of RAB Benazir Ahmed; the current RAB Director-General
Chowdhury Abdullah Al-Mamun; ADG (Operations) Khan Mohammad Azad; former ADG
(Operations) Tofayel Mustafa Sarwar; Mohammad Jahangir Alam; and Mohammad Anwar
Latif Khan. A former RAB Lieutenant Colonel, Miftah Uddin Ahmed, was also
sanctioned. The sanctioned individuals and their immediate families have been
barred from traveling to the US.
Benazir, former director general of RAB, and five officials
were designated by the Department of the Treasury under the Global Magnitsky
sanctions program in connection with serious human rights abuse. Rab is
designated pursuant to EO 13818 for being a foreign entity that is responsible
for or complicit in, or has directly or indirectly engaged in, serious human
rights abuse, it said on its website.
The State Department said that the sanctions on the
Bangladeshis were imposed on the basis of NGOs' submissions that more than 600
disappearances had taken place since 2019 and nearly 600 extrajudicial killings
had taken place since 2019 and RAB was blamed for these.
