Above the Law: The Murder of Yasmin Akhter

"PEACE, DISCIPLINE, SECURITY, PROGRESS" 

-Motto of the Bangladesh Police

What happens when those who are given the ultimate trust commit the ultimate betrayal? What happens when the institutions society charges with safeguarding the public instead turn on the innocent to protect the guilty?

Thirty years ago, the nation of Bangladesh was forced to grapple with such a question. In August of 1995, the city of Dinajpur was rocked by a scandal that shook public trust in the police to its core. A young girl coming home from work to see her mother was abducted, raped, and murdered by three men who had been sworn to protect her. And rather than hold the perpetrators accountable, law enforcement instead moved to protect their own and crack down on anyone who challenged their narrative.

Amidst a crisis of trust, the burden fell to the public and the fledgling free press to force the hand of justice. And justice was done in the end, but only at a terrible cost.

Blood on the Badge

By 1995, the nation of Bangladesh had been an independent state for over twenty years after gaining independence from Pakistan in a bloody "Liberation War". But liberation did not mean the end of systemic problems that continued to plague the young nation as its fledgling democracy took shape.

Bangladesh has one of the highest rates of sexual violence in the world, with young girls being particularly vulnerable to exploitation. Even today, rape is an endemic problem, and while women's rights have made significant gains in recent decades, domestic and sexual violence against females remains deeply entrenched in society. Bangladesh continues to have one of the highest rates of child marriage and underage prostitution on earth, and for those who have been victimized, there is little recourse for help. The national law enforcement agency - the Bangladesh Police - has consistently been ranked as one of the most corrupt law enforcement agencies in the world, and for those women who are victimized - especially when their victimizers are policemen - there can be little hope of ever seeing justice.

It was a reality that 14-year-old Yasmin Akhter no doubt was well aware of. 

One of the few extant photos of Yasmin Akhter, showing her as a younger child

Yasmin Akhter had lived a rough life. Born on August 15, 1981, to a poor family in the slums of Ramnagar in the city of Dinajpur, Yasmin Akhter was the only daughter of rickshaw driver Emaj Uddin and his wife, Sharifa Begum, and had an elder brother named Sohan. She became a student at the Lalbagh Kohinoor School in Dinajpur, but in 1992, at the age of 11, tragedy struck the family when Yasmin's father died unexpectedly. As a result, Yasmin Akhter abandoned her education at the 4th grade, left her home, and instead found employment as a housemaid, working for a wealthy woman in the upscale Dhanmondi neighborhood of Bangladesh's capital city of Dhaka.

Another photo of Yasmin Akhter. After the death of her father when she was 11 years old, Yasmin dropped out of school in the 4th grade and found work as a housemaid in an upscale neighborhood in the capital city of Dhaka. She stayed at the job for three years without being able to see her mother.

Though the homeowners provided Yasmin with room and board while she worked for them, the job was demanding on the young girl, and Yasmin - more than a hundred miles from her home in Dinajpur - went over three years without seeing her mother and brother. In August of 1995, when Yasmin turned 14, she asked her employer's husband if she could take some time off to return home and visit her mother. He declined Yasmin's request, telling her to wait for the Durga Puja holiday in late September when she could go on leave. But Yasmin, despairingly homesick, didn't want to wait any longer.

On the afternoon of August 23, 1995, Yasmin finished her day of work after dropping off her employer's son at school and, without telling the owners of the home where she worked, set off on the long journey to return home to Dinajpur to finally see her family again. Unable to board the bus directly home to Dinajpur, Yasmin boarded a bus from Dhaka to the nearby city of Thakurgaon. From Thakurgaon, she took a bus to the district of Beldanga, an outskirt district a few miles north of Dinajpur city. There, she waited at the Doshmile Bus Stop at an intersection, in front of a betel leaf shop, for the final bus that would take her to her destination.

But Yasmin's bus never came. Unbeknownst to her, she had gotten on the wrong line and all of the buses had stopped for the day. As the night wore on, the girl must have become more and more acutely aware of the dangers of waiting alone in the dark. She asked the tea shop owner, Jobed Ali, if he could take her to Dinajpur proper. Ali said he could not, but he told her that she was welcome to wait in his shop until morning when the buses would resume.

The Doshmile intersection in Beldanga, northern Dinajpur, where Yasmin waited on the night of August 23-24, 1995, after accidentally getting on the wrong bus. While waiting for morning to get back on the right line, she would have a fatal encounter with the Bangladesh Police.

At around 3:30 AM on August 24th, as Yasmin waited, a police van came upon the intersection. Three officers of the Bangladesh Police were inside; Assistant Sub Inspector Moinul Hoque, Constable Abdus Sattar, and the driver, Constable Amrita Lal Barman - all from the city's Kotwali precinct. Noticing the young girl waiting alone, Amrita Lal pulled the van up alongside the bench where the young girl sat. "Where are you going?", he asked. Yasmin told the officer that she was going home to her mother and was waiting for the bus. "The buses have stopped for tonight", the officer replied. "Where is your home?", he asked. Yasmin told him her house was in Dinajpur. "We are going to Dinajpur", Amrita Lal told Yasmin. "Come with us, we will take you there."

At first, the young girl was hesitant. She told the officers she would rather wait until morning. But the officers were insistent. "It's not safe for you to wait alone at night", some bystanders later recalled Lal telling her. The officer began to scold Yasmin. "You should come with us. I am asking you to come. Why won't you come?". Other townspeople also urgeds the girl to get in the police van. 

Eventually, after some hesitation, Yasmin Akhter got into the police van. It was a fatal mistake.

After only a short distance, the three officers turned on their young passenger. Bystanders later recalled seeing the girl jump from the van after it had traveled only a few hundred yards south and run into the bushes. The van stopped and the three policemen, wielding flashlights, quickly got out and ran after her.

Two rickshaw drivers came upon the officers and were immediately interrogated. "Have you seen a girl around here? We're looking for her", ASI Moinul Hoque told them. The rickshaw drivers replied that they had not. "If you see her, turn her over to us", the officer said.

At that moment, a passing car's headlights illuminated the area, revealing Yasmin lying still along the side of the road. The rickshaw drivers watched as the three policemen grabbed their screaming captive, shoved her back into the police van, and drove away.

14-year-old Yasmin Akhter was never seen alive again.

As daylight broke, at the nearby Sadhana Adivasi Primary School, passers-by noticed a trail of bloodstains, and among them were scattered a girl's handkerchief, sandals, hand fan, and broken bracelets. Three hours later, on Gobindpur Road in Dinajpur's Raniganj neighborhood - less than five miles away from the bus stop - a rickshaw driver found the badly-bruised body of Yasmin Akhter lying in front of the local BRAC office. The young girl had been beaten, gang-raped, and strangled to death. Bystanders later recalled seeing a police van pass by the office earlier in the morning, with the occupants throwing "something" from the vehicle as it moved.

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Word of Yasmin Akhter's death spread quickly in the Beldanga area. Many passers-by had seen the young girl's interaction with the police the prior night, and once her body was found, it didn't take long for people to put the two together. Clearly, the girl had been abducted and murdered by police.

By morning, protesters had gathered outside at the Doshmile intersection as Yasmin Akhter's body was removed. Policemen fired blank shots into the air to disperse the crowd and arrested 37 demonstrators on the spot. The officers removing Yasmin's body also publicly stripped the corpse naked in front of the crowd as they loaded it onto a rickshaw cart - an act of callous indignity that caused outrage among the onlookers.

Yasmin Akhter's body, showing visible signs of violent assault prior to death. She had been raped and murdered in the parking lot of a nearby school by the three police officers and her body dumped outside a BRAC office. Despite the obvious evidence implicating police officers in her rape and murder, the Bangladesh Police initially insisted that Yasmin was an "unidentified prostitute" who had killed herself by jumping from a vehicle.

By now, it was also just as clear to the Bangladesh Police that Yasmin Akhter had been murdered by their own. But, rather than hold the perpetrators accountable, the authorities moved quickly to suppress the case and control the narrative. The Kotwali police precinct - the same station where Yasmin's murderers worked - filed a report claiming that an "unidentified young woman" had been found dead, and the chief of the station, Mahtab Hossein, publicly claimed that he had brought prostitutes into the hospital where they had positively identified Yasmin as "one of theirs".

After a hasty autopsy by a police-appointed medical examiner - Dr. Mohammed Mohsin - the authorities deemed Yasmin's death a suicide by jumping from a vehicle, and the young girl's body was quickly buried at the Balubari Sheikh Jahangir cemetery. The authorities refused to register the case with the prosecutor's office and stated that their investigation had been concluded. The police did not even hold a memorial service or turn the body over to the girl's family. 

Of course, the police knew that few were likely to believe their story, but - in an era before the advent of social media - word was sure to travel slowly among the public, and the Bangladesh Police had ample time to control the narrative. As far as the Bangladesh Police were concerned, the matter was now closed and any possible avenues of backlash had been manageably contained.

Or so they thought.

The Free Press

By 1995, The Daily Uttarbangla was a relatively young and small newspaper in Dinajpur - not very widely circulated outside of its local community. Yet it had a proud four-year tradition of standing up for journalistic freedoms in a country still gripped by autocracy.

On the morning of August 25, 1995, a day after Yasmin Akhter's body had been found, the chief editor of The Daily Uttarbangla, Matiur Rahman, was returning from the capital city of Dhaka to his home in Dinajpur when he got a call from a local Member of Parliament, Manoranjan Shill Gopal. Gopal had a bombshell story for Rahman. He told the editor that a young girl in his district had been abducted, raped, and murdered by police in the Doshmile area, and that law enforcement was covering up the story.

When Rahman arrived at the offices for The Daily Uttarbangla, he began investigating the story. He called the local police station to inquire. The police were less than transparent. They told Rahman that a "prostitute" had been found dead, and that they suspected it to be a "suicide". The body had been buried after an autopsy, and the matter had been closed.

But Rahman didn't let up. The following day, he obtained a photo of Yasmin Akhter from the girl's family. He told the police he was going to go public with the story. The police response was to threaten him. If Rahman published the story, they told him, he would be arrested and charged.

Matiur Rahman, senior editor of The Daily Uttarbangla (pictured in 2025). After Yasmin Akhter's rape and murder at the hands of law enforcement officers, Rahman defied the Bangladesh Police's threats and published a story on the murder and cover-up. His refusal to bow to police pressure ultimately helped force the hand of the justice system.

Rahman knew the consequences of standing up to the police could be dire. The Bangladesh Police were - and still are - one of the most powerful agencies in the entire country, with wide influence and limited oversight. Indeed, if the story he had was true, it only further highlighted the impunity with which law enforcement operated; a young girl had been abducted and murdered, and the police were covering up their involvement rather than bringing the perpetrators to justice.

But Rahman believed strongly in journalistic integrity. He ignored the police threats and told them he would go public with the story anyway.

That night, the power to the offices of The Daily Uttarbangla was cut. While blackouts in Dinajpur's unstable energy grid were not uncommon, Rahman knew this wasn't a simple blackout. The police were undoubtedly attempting one final time to keep the truth from coming out. But Rahman was undeterred. Going to a neighbor's house, he borrowed a generator and used it to publish the story.

The next day, Dinajpur exploded.

August 27: The Day of Rage

By the morning of August 27, 1995, the veil of secrecy had shattered. Thanks to The Daily Uttarbangla's reporting, the story had spread far and wide and had been picked up and circulated by other outlets. Yasmin Akhter's murder was no longer a secret. Now everyone knew that a girl had been abducted and murdered, that law enforcement officers were suspected, and that the Bangladesh Police were engaged in a systematic cover-up. 

In Dinajpur, local police stations and outposts found themselves under siege. Throngs of demonstrators began to gather outside the Kotwali precinct early that morning, and the crowds continued to grow and grow as the day progressed. Other crowds assembled all over the city, blocking roads and surrounding police vans.

By 11AM, thousands of angry protesters had gathered in the Lillimore area of Dinajpur, where a police precinct was located, carrying signs and banners demanding justice for the murdered girl and the arrest of the policemen. "Remember Yasmin", read the banners. "Yasmin is our daughter", "Yasmin is Bangladesh".

The Bangladesh Police did not react well. Riot squads were called in with orders to put down the protests and clear the area. Shortly before noon, one of the protesters was publicly detained by officers and severely beaten. As members of the crowd tried to move in to save him, police began indiscriminately firing tear gas at demonstrators to force them back, dragging stragglers into barricades to beat them with batons. The demonstrators responded by hurling rocks, bricks, bats, and sticks at officers and police vans. At that point, several of the riot policemen responded with live gunfire, shooting blindly into the crowd.

One of the demonstrators at the front of the procession, a man named Abdul Quader, was shot through the heart and died instantly. The crowd scattered amidst the shooting, carrying Quader's body with them. As he fled, another man in the procession, a doctor named Mehrab Ali Samu, was shot and wounded. Badly injured, Samu crawled to a small traffic island before collapsing to the ground. A group of officers surrounded Samu and began kicking him before dragging him to a nearby police van.

The Lillimore intersection in Dinajpur, as it appeared in the 1990s. It would be the site of the deadliest part of the riots in the wake of Yasmin Akhter's murder.

Several members of the crowd approached the officers, pleading with them to hand Samu over to them so he could be given medical treatment, but the officers shoved the dying man into the police van and drove away with him. As the van drove away, it ran over and killed an 18-year-old demonstrator standing near a boundary wall; officers quickly removed his body as well. Neither Mehrab Ali Samu nor the 18-year-old demonstrator were ever seen alive again.

But the crowd did not let up. After briefly dispersing following the gunfire, the mob of demonstrators reassembled and marched back towards the local Detective Branch office, where a crowd of armed officers had already gathered to await them. 

Once again, the officers opened fire. A rickshaw driver named Siraj Islam was fatally shot as he entered the crossfire. Still alive, Siraj was taken to a local police station, where he died. Elsewhere, at a nearby railway station, another armed clash broke out when police fired live rounds to disperse demonstrators, killing a young child whose body was swiftly removed.

Three of the victims of police violence during the riots of August 27th (from left to right): Abdul Quader, Dr. Mehrab Ali Samu, and rickshaw driver Siraj Islam. The bodies of four other civilians killed by police were removed by authorities and never publicly identified. Over 300 others were injured.

The violence, however, did little to disperse the angry mob. By the end of the day, four police vans, four police outposts, and several government offices had been set on fire, and burning tires had been strewn all over the roads. Rioters erected makeshift barricades of debris and burning trash to block police reinforcements from arriving, and even forced their way into the local Kotwali police precinct, looting it and freeing dozens of demonstrators who had been imprisoned.

Finally, unable to control the mob, the authorities called in the elite Bangladesh Rifles from Dhaka. A 38-hour curfew was instituted, and martial law was temporarily instituted in the city. But by now it was too late to stop the backlash. Protests spread from Dinajpur to Ramnagar, from Ramnagar to Thakurgaon, and from Thakurgaon to the capital city of Dhaka. The national Women's Council organized rallies demanding justice for Yasmin and the arrest of the police officers responsible. In the city of Rangpur to the south, a crowd of angry protesters besieged a police station in a demonstration that would last two entire days. 

With even local law enforcement officers beginning to join the demonstrations, the Bangladesh Police's hand was finally forced. Within a day of the riots beginning, the three officers who had murdered Yasmin - Moinul Hoque, Abdus Sattar, and Amrita Lal - were all placed on leave pending criminal investigation.

The Road to Justice

By August 29th, 1995, the city of Dinajpur was quiet once more. With the city effectively under military occupation, the riots had subsided for the time being, but the tension in the air remained palpable. 

A group of journalists protests in Dinajpur following the murder of Yasmin Akhter and the subsequent riots of August 27th, 1995. The banner they are carrying reads "Silent Procession of the Press Club: We protest the murder of eight people including the young woman"

The damage caused over the prior days of rage had been extensive. Four police vans had been destroyed and stripped for parts. Four police outposts - including the Kotwali precinct where the accused killers worked - had been burned and looted, along with several nearby newspaper offices accused of sympathies to the police. Over 300 people - demonstrators and policemen - had been hospitalized with serious injuries, including dozens of demonstrators who had suffered gunshot wounds.

The interior of a police van damaged during the unrest, burned and stripped for parts by rioters

The bodies of Siraj Islam and Mehrab Ali Samu - who had both died in police custody after being shot during the unrest - were released to their families, but four others presumed dead in the riots were nowhere to be found. Several people later found bloodied clothes scattered in a nearby cemetery - an indication the bodies of the four missing demonstrators had been hastily buried in unmarked graves. The atmosphere in Dinajpur was described poignantly in a local paper: "The whole city is like a ghost of ghosts."

By now, word of the crisis had reached the government in Dhaka. Prime Minister Khaleda Zia, whose government was already unpopular over a corruption scandal, now faced yet another avenue of criticism. Over the years, the Bangladesh Police had been rocked by scandals around corruption, sexual assault, and brutality, with the government in Dhaka far too hesitant to address their problems. Now, a young girl had been raped and murdered by police, and the government had responded by shooting at demonstrators. It was a public relations nightmare for Prime Minister Zia. Opposition leader Sheikh Hasina - a longtime critic of the Bangladesh Police's lack of oversight - visited Dinajpur on August 29th, and said of the Prime Minister: "Khaleda's time has come. Now she must go."

On August 30, Yasmin Akhter's body was exhumed for a second autopsy. This time, it was determined that the girl had been raped and strangled to death, and her body was turned over to her family for a proper burial. A day later, the three officers who had abducted and killed Yasmin Akhter - Moinul Hoque, Abdus Sattar, and Amrita Lal -  were arrested on suspicion of murder.

On September 12, Prime Minister Khaleda Zia visited Dinajpur to express condolences for Yasmin's murder, but her reception was cold, particularly as Zia's sister - an MP representing Dinajpur - was already unpopular after being caught up in a series of corruption scandals. When the Prime Minister arrived in the city, demonstrators greeted her by waving black flags.

It didn't help that, only a few days after the murder, Prime Minister Zia traveled to Beijing to give a keynote speech at the Fourth UN Women's Conference on behalf of Bangladesh. The irony of a Prime Minister whose government was accused of covering up the rape and murder of a young girl giving a speech on women's rights was not lost on Bangladeshi journalists. "The Prime Minister must go to Beijing", one article by Journalist Faiz Ahmed read, "carrying the burden of Yasmin's body".

Bangladeshi Prime Minister Khaleda Zia gives her keynote speech at the Fourth UN Women's Conference on September 5th, 1995, only a few days after the murder of Yasmin Akhter. The fact that Zia was giving a speech on women's rights after her government had been accused of covering up the rape and murder of a young girl led to wide domestic ridicule back in Bangladesh.

It would take nearly two years for the case against Moinul Hoque, Abdus Sattar, and Amrita Lal to go to trial, in part because the Bangladesh Police refused for months to even register the criminal complaint. Because of this, responsibility for the case was transferred to the Criminal Investigation Department of a separate police branch.

On May 14, 1996, the Criminal Investigation Department, after running its own separate investigation, formally charged Moinul Hoque, Abdus Sattar, and Amrita Lal with the rape and murder of Yasmin Akhter. Additionally, authorities charged six other men - Deputy Commissioner Jabbar Faruque, Police Superintendent Abdul Motaleb, Sub-Inspector Swapan Kumar Chakraborty, Sub-Inspector Rezaul Karim, Sub-Inspector Mahtab Uddin, and Magistrate Fakhruddin Ahmed - with conspiring to cover up the murder and misleading investigators. On June 6th, a tenth charge was registered against Doctor Mohammed Mohsin, the doctor who had conducted the original autopsy on the girl's body, accusing him of falsifying evidence. Due to security concerns and fears of vigilante violence against the defendants, the case was transferred from Dinajpur to the city of Rangpur.

On September 21, 1996, with Senior Prosecutor Afzal Hossein leading the case, the trials of the ten defendants began. Over 54 witnesses testified during the trials, which lasted a total of 123 days.

The officers' defense was almost laughable. While Moinul Hoque, Abdus Sattar, and Amrita Lal admitted that they had picked up Yasmin Akhter on the night of August 24, 1995, they vehemently denied raping or killing her. Attorneys for the defense argued that, after Yasmin had been picked up, she had inexplicably jumped from the van and was killed by the impact, and that, out of nervousness, the policemen abandoned the girl's body by the BRAC office. Later during the trial, one of the defense attorneys changed the story, claiming that Yasmin had consensual sex with one of the officers in the van before jumping out.

But the defense's case was heavily undercut by the testimony of the medical examiner who had conducted the second autopsy. "This girl was throttled to death after a violent rape and a head injury", he said, "and there is no other explanation for her killing".

Other eyewitnesses testified for the prosecution, including witnesses who had seen Yasmin being picked up by the officers before trying to escape from them and being forced back into the van, undercutting the defense's argument of a suicide or accident. Additionally, a police informant testified that the Bangladesh Police had known almost from the outset that their own officers had murdered Yasmin Akhter, and that there had been an internal cover up at the direction of Police Superintendent Abdul Motaleb and Station Chief Mahtab Hossein, who had filed false reports that the girl was a "prostitute" and had even tried to bribe local newspapers to stop them from covering the story.

The evidence against the defendants was beyond overwhelming; yet this case was also one that lacked precedent, and the outcome was by no means predictable. The case against Yasmin Akhter's murderers was one of the first times that law enforcement officers had ever stood trial for killing a civilian. Too many other times, officers accused of crimes had either been acquitted at trial or had simply never been charged. As obvious as the evidence was against the defendants, whether or not the justice system would deliver on its obligations was still very much in question.

Ultimately, however, the public pressure and outrage over Yasmin's murder paid off. On August 31, 1997, two years to the day after the case against the officers had initially been filed, a court in Rangpur delivered their judgement. 

At 10:32 AM, in a crowded courtroom in Rangpur with Yasmin's mother Sharifa Begum in attendance, the judges read out the 137-page verdict against the defendants. ASI Moinul Hoque, Constable Abdus Sattar, and Constable Amrita Lal Barman - the officers who had abducted, raped, and killed Yasmin Akhter - were all found guilty of murder by the judge panel and sentenced to death.

"These men have committed the worst possible crime, and they deserve to die", said District Judge Abdul Matin, "especially because they, being policemen, were supposed to protect the helpless girl."

As Hoque, Sattar, and Lal were handcuffed and led away from the dock, Sharifa Begum broke down in tears of relief. "Justice has been done", she told reporters as she left the courtroom, flanked by women's rights activists.

But even so, justice was only partially served. While the three policemen who murdered Yasmin had rightly been convicted and sentenced to death, the court acquitted all of the remaining defendants. The officers who had tried (and failed) to cover up Yasmin Akhter's murder, who had smeared her as a "prostitute", who had tried to destroy evidence, and who had threatened The Daily Uttarbangla when the press exposed their cover-up, left the courtroom that day as free men.

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All three of the condemned officers filed immediate appeals of their convictions, beginning what would be a long process of litigation before the death sentences could be carried out. It would be another four years before the officers' cases would be heard. On May 28, 2001, the High Court upheld the death sentences against the three officers in what was considered a landmark judgement at the time, as the few officers in Bangladesh that had been convicted of crimes against civilians nearly always had their convictions vacated on appeal. But this time it was different, and Moinul Hoque, Abdus Sattar, and Amrita Lal were sent to Rangpur Jail to await their date with the gallows.

Three years later, on May 19, 2004, the final appeals of the three officers were denied by the Supreme Court of Bangladesh. In July, President Iajuddin Ahmed rejected Hoque and Sattar's appeals for clemency, paving the way for the officers to at last face the gallows.

At 10:00 PM on Tuesday, August 31, 2004 - seven years to the day after they had been sentenced to death - Hoque and Sattar were informed that their final requests for clemency had been denied, and that they would be hanged two hours later. The two policemen were visibly "dumbfounded", according to a jail official, and spend the last hours of their lives waiting in their cells, reciting prayers from the Quran.

At one minute past midnight on September 1, 2004, the death sentences were carried out. After receiving last rites from their priests, both Moinul Hoque and Abdus Sattar were executed by hanging side-by-side on a single gallows at Rangpur Jail. The two officers went to their deaths professing their innocence.

Jail officers remove the bodies of Moinul Hoque and Abdus Sattar from Rangpur Jail following their executions for the murder of Yasmin Akhter. It was one of the first times in Bangladeshi history that law enforcement officers had been judicially executed for the killing of a civilian.

The last defendant, Amrita Lal, remained on death row, with his planned execution having been delayed by a last minute appeal for mercy by his father to the President of Bangladesh. But Lal's hopes for clemency were quickly dashed. Only hours after it was filed, Bangladeshi President Iajuddin Ahmed rejected Lal's mercy petition. Two weeks later, on September 15, 2004, the jail authorities at Rangpur announced that Amrita Lal would die in two weeks time.

Amrita Lal Barman would spend the final hours of his life deep in prayer in his jail cell, while hundreds of demonstrators gathered outside Rangpur Jail in support of his execution. At 12:01 AM on September 29th, 2004, Lal - the very man who had set the entire case in motion by luring Yasmin Akhter to her rape and death - met his fate. The former constable was executed on the same gallows in Rangpur Jail where his two accomplices had been hanged just four weeks earlier. 

Unlike Hoque and Sattar, however, Lal chose to drop the act and accept responsibility for the horrific crime he had set in motion. The condemned former officer took his final moments on the gallows to apologize to the family of Yasmin Akhter, asking the mother of the murdered girl to forgive him for killing her daughter.

Justice in the Age of ICE: America's Yasmin Moment

In the more than thirty years since Yasmin Akhter's death, the anniversary of her murder - August 24th - has been memorialized in Bangladesh as "Resistance Day Against Repression of Women", or "Yasmin's Day", by Bangladeshi human rights groups and activists, who gather annually to hold vigils and call for an end to sexual violence against women and girls.

Women's rights activists hold a vigil next to Yasmin Akhter's grave on August 24, 2016 - the 21st anniversary of her abduction and murder. In the years since her murder, August 24th has been annually commemorated in Bangladesh as "Yasmin Day" or "Day for the Prevention of Violence Against Women"

Yasmin's mother, Sharifa Begum, was determined to make sure her daughter's death wasn't for nothing. For the rest of her life, until she died in 2024, Sharifa Begum became an ardent activist for women's rights, hosting memorial vigils for her daughter every August 24th and campaigning for legislative reform.

"I hope that this is not the heartache of any mother like me, and that it does not happen to anyone else", Sharifa tearfully told Bangladesh's MohonaTV in 2022, when interviewed on the 27th anniversary of her daughter's death.

Yasmin Akhter's mother, Sharifa Begum, cries as she holds a photograph of her murdered daughter while being interviewed at her home. Until her death in 2024 - 29 years after Yasmin's murder - Sharifa Begum served as an ardent activist for women's rights and police accountability in Bangladesh

At the bus stop in Doshmile, right in front of the tea cafe where Yasmin was abducted, a large memorial with a mosaic of the murdered girl's face sits overlooking the intersection where she waited in vain for the bus to take her home. Opposite the memorial mosaic, on a traffic island in the middle of the intersection, a plaque commemorates Yasmin's murder.

In front of the tea shop at Doshmile intersection where she was abducted, a memorial was erected bearing a mosaic of Yasmin Akhter's face.

However, while the incident remains a landmark case in Bangladesh, full acknowledgement of responsibility from the police never came. To this day, not a single police officer has faced justice for the killings of the seven protesters in the aftermath of Yasmin's murder or the numerous attempts by the Bangladesh Police to obstruct the investigation and protect their own officers from justice. And in 2024, when a film about the incident, entitled Ami Yasmin Bolchi was announced - starring famed Bangladeshi actress Bidya Sinha Saha Mim as Yasmin - the Bangladesh Police exerted pressure on the filmmakers until the project ceased production. Despite the great leaps forward in the thirty years since Yasmin's murder, it is clear that Bangladesh's fight for equality and accountability is far from over.

When I started writing this article several months earlier, I set out to show it as a case of how important the free press is in ensuring accountability in an age of authoritarianism. There is a reason that so many authoritarian regimes target the free press. There is a reason why the Bangladesh Police tried so hard to stop The Daily Uttarbangla from going public with the story about Yasmin Akhter's murder. When the government controls the media, and controls the narrative, it inherently stifles accountability. The United States is about one year into the second Trump Administration - a year that has seen a wholly unprecedented degree of assault on the pillars of democracy, accountability, and freedom of speech.

Under the Trump Administration, the US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has been transformed into a brutal secret police force acting as an arm of President Donald Trump, ruthlessly enforcing his appalling immigration policies across the country with unprecedented acts of violence and cruelty, including beatings, tear gassings, raids on schools and workplaces, and arbitrary detention of anyone suspected of being an "illegal immigrant" - even US citizens. ICE officers have been filmed smashing windows, dragging mothers and fathers from their cars with their children inside, body slamming women, and menacing journalists and peaceful protesters with weapons.

While I have long seen the parallels between Bangladesh and the United States regarding police violence and the media's role in forcing accountability since I learned about this case, I did not expect this story to suddenly become as relevant as it is now. As I was finishing this piece, a horrific tragedy in Minnesota thrust the issue of police violence, accountability, and government cover-ups back into the spotlight - and I cannot help but see just how stark the parallels are between this recent act of police violence and the murder of Yasmin Akhter over thirty years ago on the other side of the world.

On January 7th, 2026, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, a 37-year-old woman named Renee Good was shot and killed by an ICE agent while leaving her driveway. Bystander video of the shooting from multiple angles clearly shows Good stopping her car and waving ICE vehicles through, before several masked agents approach her vehicle with guns drawn and attempt to pull open her door. Good is then seen turning her vehicle and trying to drive away at low speed, at which point an agent aims through her side window and shoots her three times, killing her and causing her van to crash into a parked car. The masked agent then calmly walks away from the scene, with no apparent injuries, gets into a vehicle, and drives away.

As of the time of this writing, the agent who killed Good has not been identified and no charges have been filed. However, the Trump Administration has already come out forcefully in defense of ICE, baselessly labeling Good a "domestic terrorist" and falsely claiming she ran over the ICE agent with her car. Federal agencies have also blocked Minnesota state authorities from investigating the incident, with the FBI and DHS refusing to cooperate with state investigators.

 

As I said earlier, the parallels to the Yasmin Akhter case are quite stark, even down to the lies by authorities who are trying to gaslight their citizens into thinking they didn't see what they clearly saw. The Bangladesh Police from the outset tried to paint Yasmin as a "prostitute" who killed herself, rather than the victim of a police gang-rape and murder that she so clearly was, and likewise the Trump Administration has falsely smeared Renee Good as a "domestic terrorist."

In a press conference the day of the shooting, DHS secretary Kristi Noem said of the incident "It was an act of domestic terrorism. What happened was our ICE officers were out on an enforcement action, they got stuck in the snow because of the adverse weather that is in Minneapolis, and they were attempting to push out their vehicle, and a woman attacked them and those surrounding them, and attempted to run them over and ram them with her vehicle."

Vice President JD Vance similarly blamed Good for her own death, calling her killing "a tragedy of her own making" and claiming she was "a victim of left-wing ideology."

President Donald Trump himself also wasted no time in blaming Renee Good and, in true fashion, lying completely about what happened. "The woman driving the car was very disorderly, obstructing and resisting, who then violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE Officer, who seems to have shot her in self defense", he posted on his social media website Truth Social. "The reason these incidents are happening is because the Radical Left is threatening, assaulting, and targeting our Law Enforcement Officers and ICE Agents on a daily basis."

I hardly need to tell you that these are all nothing but brazen, deliberate, transparent, and bold-faced lies. Of course, lies are nothing new for this administration. Trump and his cronies lie as easily as they breathe, and have done so for eternity. But even by the very low standards of this administration, the scale of these lies is positively shocking. This administration is turning the gaslighting up to a whole new level, trying to convince us that we didn't see what we all so clearly saw in that video. And this time, it's not an "illegal alien" whose killing they are trying to justify. It's a US citizen - a young, white, American woman leaving her all-American suburban home.

I cannot help but think back to the lies that the Bangladesh Police told the public following the murder of Yasmin Akhter. Like what just happened in Minneapolis, the evidence of what happened in Dinajpur was overwhelming. Police officers abducted, violently raped, and murdered a young girl, and then spent the next several days telling the people who saw the abduction, who saw Yasmin attempting to escape her captors, who saw the police throw her brutalized body from their car into the road - who saw EVERYTHING with their own eyes - that they didn't see exactly what they saw, and that Yasmin Akhter's death was her own fault and not the fault of the policemen who so obviously murdered her.

And, like the Bangladesh Police did with Yasmin Akhter, the Trump Administration's response to the killing of Renee Good has been to crack down viciously on protesters and the media, even tear gassing and macing young teenagers demonstrating at Roosevelt High School - all while publicly defending the indefensible actions of the ICE officer and obstructing Minnesota state authorities from investigating the shooting.

It's all there. The parallels are uncanny, from the brazen crime itself to the cover-up to the incessant lying and gaslighting of everyone who saw what happened. Indeed, Renee Good is - in a way - our own Yasmin Akhter. And if we don't learn from how the people of Bangladesh stood up for Yasmin, things are only bound to get worse.

This is a very dark time for America, and it is in my view a culmination of half of my country openly embracing a populist authoritarian movement for an entire decade, tolerating their constant lies, and gaslighting people who can and should know better. 

I do have some hope left. I suppose I am ever the optimist. The democratic guardrails of Bangladesh in 1995 were far weaker than America's. And despite the wide power and influence of the Bangladesh Police, the gaslighting didn't work in Dinajpur thirty years ago. The bystanders who witnessed Moinul Hoque, Abdus Sattar, and Amrita Lal kidnapping Yasmin Akhter at the bus stop in Doshmile saw what they saw, and they didn't accept it when the authorities lied to them. And when their government refused to hold the murderers accountable, the community and the free press organized to force the government's hand. They did not relent and acquiesce to the gaslighting. They fought back, hard - and for years - to force accountability. And at the end of the day - even though they most certainly did not fix all ofnthe underlying problems that enabled the murder - the protesters triumphed and helped send Yasmin's murderers to the gallows, something that assuredly would never have happened had they not defiantly rejected their government's lies.

I hope the American people do the same. Don't accept the lies of this administration and the cynical cowards who enable it. Don't let them get away with this. We all saw the video. We all saw what we saw, and we all know exactly what this was. This was a murder - a deliberate murder of an unarmed woman - and the murderer must be held accountable. And if this administration refuses to hold the murderer accountable, we must follow in the steps of the people of Bangladesh thirty years ago and force them to take action.

Donald Trump and his enablers have gotten away with so many atrocities over the last decade. Every time it seems like they will one day face judgement for their crimes, they escape accountability and are even more emboldened. But this is something we absolutely cannot let them get away with. A federal agent brazenly and publicly executed a defenseless, unarmed woman in her car - in her neighborhood - in front of everyone, and the administration is openly and deliberately lying about what we all clearly saw, waging a war against reality itself. 

If we let this slide - if we do not step up now and force the hand of justice and accountability to act - then we will come to regret it. I'm sure many people have looked back at the regimes of Nazi Germany, of Fascist Italy, and have wondered why the people of those nations didn't stop the rise of authoritarianism when they could. We are living in that moment, and if we don't seize it now, we never will, and we will cease to have a country, and we will spend the rest of our lives wondering what happened to it.