The case for documenting July Uprising
The International Truth and Justice Project (ITJP), UK initiated its project to document atrocities during the July 2024 movement as the crisis unfolded on the ground, just weeks before it culminated in the fall of the Awami League government on August 5.
An international organization specializing in documenting human rights violations during violent conflicts, the ITJP is best known for its work in Sri Lanka. There, it built the largest digital archive of atrocities spanning the final phases of the Sri Lankan Civil War in 2009 through the post-war era.
As the violence in Bangladesh escalated in mid-July—overwhelmingly driven by state security forces and Awami League party cadres under the ruling Awami League (AL) administration—the ITJP began discussing a strategy to document the violations.
However, operating during the height of the uprising presented an almost impossible logistical challenge. The environment was volatile, the AL government had enforced a total internet blackout, and any overt attempt by an international organization to investigate would have been met with immediate hostility, placing the physical safety of anyone involved at extreme risk.
It was an almost impossible problem to solve. On-the-ground investigations would inevitably encounter hostile law enforcement, government intelligence forces, and ruling party cadres.
For an investigator, exposure would almost certainly mean detention, if not worse, including torture and enforced disappearance. Thankfully, it was a dilemma the ITJP did not have to resolve; the government fell on August 5, with then-Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina fleeing the country, leading to the swift formation of a new interim government.
ITJP’s fieldwork began immediately with a team of five on-the-ground investigators working alongside a small international team outside Bangladesh. The organization also partnered with The Outsider Movie Company and The Tech-Global Institute, which provided digital forensic assistance.
By January 2025, the organisation had produced a substantial report documenting the killings of July 19, one of the three deadliest days of the uprising, as well as two short films.
One film provides a forensic examination of the atrocities committed in front of Jatrabari Police Station on August 5; the other offers a forensic case study of the summary execution of a single protester in Gazipur on the same day.
ITJP’s field investigation protocol used interviews with victims' family members as a foundational starting point. From there, we, the field investigators, aimed to identify and interview direct eyewitnesses to the killing wherever possible.
The third layer involved gathering documentary records, including national identification (NID) cards, death certificates, morgue reports, First Information Reports (FIRs), and news media coverage.
Identifying the exact place of occurrence was also a standard part of the protocol. This involved taking photographs and video footage of the reported spot and its immediate vicinity, alongside collecting any available visuals recorded before, during, or immediately after the killing.
In many cases, mobile phone photos and videos related to the killings were available. These captured moments ranging from victims attending protests or lying wounded to images taken immediately after death or inside a morgue.
As we began investigating individual cases, we conducted an initial geolocation process. We travelled to the reported scenes of the killings to capture photos and videos corresponding directly with family or witness testimonies, while also taking real-time screenshots of Google Maps on site.
These data points were later cross-referenced by forensic experts to verify the findings in ITJP’s report.
Recording the killings—one case at a time
One of our earliest investigations took us to Ashulia to examine the case of As Sabur. His death became one of the most widely discussed killings of the uprising because of its brutality.
Sabur was among the victims whose bodies were piled onto a three-wheeler van and later torched inside a police vehicle in front of Ashulia Police Station. While footage of the charred bodies had already circulated, a second mobile phone video that emerged in late August shocked the country.
It captured the chilling casualness with which the atrocities were carried out. The video shows officers tossing limp bodies onto a pile like discarded furniture. Sabur was later identified as one of the lifeless bodies in the pile.
Our initial visit to Sabur’s family home took place on August 15, well before the body-tossing footage surfaced. We spoke to his family members and recorded statements from his mother and a neighbour.
Sabur’s mother, Jannat, described her son as a shy teenager who mostly kept to himself.
“He had never been to any protests before in his life. This was his first time. He did want to go to a protest a few times before [since the uprising began]. He wanted to go to Jahangirnagar University. But I told him, ‘What if there were shootings and you got shot! Don’t go,’” her recorded statement reads.
Establishing an exact timeline was one of the most difficult parts of nearly every case—capturing how and when the family realized something was wrong, and the moment they learned of the death.
“The next time we heard from him was at 3:00 pm," Sabur’s mother said. "Sabur called Zihad [his close friend and neighbour] at around 3:00 pm. Zihad was at home. He told Zihad that two people were shot right next to him. At around 3:30 pm he called Zihad again and told him that he was in a safe place. That was the last we heard from him.”
To reconstruct these timelines, we had to ask for constant clarification: ‘Who called whom? How did you know your son called his friend, and when did you find out? Do you have the number of the stranger who called to say your brother was shot?’
It was often difficult for traumatized families to recall precise sequences, but these promptings helped them remember.
When the body-tossing footage went public, we conducted a follow-up interview with Sabur’s friend Zihad, who confirmed recognizing him:
“The first time I watched the recent video…was on Facebook. Sabur’s elder brother first saw it approximately a week or 5/6 days [from September 9] ago and he recognized him in the video. He told his parents about the video. After that they also saw the video and recognized him. The first time I saw the clip it was blurred, so I wasn’t able to recognize him in that clip. After that a neighbor of mine first sent me a screenshot which was clear. I recognized him in the screenshot... And now I saw [a clearer footage] and I could recognize him in this clip.”
Scrutinizing trauma
The ITJP’s investigative methodology required interviewing family members and witnesses as granularly as possible. This meant asking seemingly obvious or repetitive questions, such as, "Why did you think your son was missing?" Or asking a witness, "You said you carried his body and sat with him on a rickshaw. But how did you carry the body? Who else helped you?"
Witnesses sometimes found these questions perplexing. Amid active gunfire, with bodies dropping around them and the fear of being killed next, those carrying a bleeding person were not observing how many people were helping. In a normal conversation, asking for that data can sound almost idiotic.
But these questions were meant to elicit details a witness or grieving relative might deem unnecessary to mention. It is those details that gave the statements their evidentiary weight.
It was a challenging process. Answering these repetitive, seemingly unnecessary questions was often exhausting, and sometimes people felt we were doubting their accounts. We tried to explain that we needed as much microscopic detail as possible to ensure the statements would hold up under legal or international scrutiny.
Despite the difficulty of recounting these events, many subjects displayed remarkable patience. In the case of Rasel Gazi—who was also killed in Ashulia on August 5—an 18-year-old Higher Secondary Certificate (HSC) candidate named Shanto Roy spoke to us for nearly two hours, systematically answering questions.
Shanto, who had no prior relationship with Rasel, had gone to Ashulia’s Baipal area on August 5 to join the protests. Upon arrival, he and his friends were caught in active gunfire.
“...it was members of the Chhatra League firing from different buildings. Fortunately, these bullets didn’t hit many people—probably only two or three individuals were shot.”
We pressed for specifics: What was the time? How long did the shooting last? How frequent was it?
“This continued for about half an hour, until approximately 11 AM," Shanto recalled. "The police were standing about 100 meters away from us, and by then, around 600 to 700 people had gathered. We took the red plastic barricades from the road and arranged them side by side to create a barrier between ourselves and the police.”
He described how the crowd began moving toward police officers stationed near the Ashulia thana (precinct), using plastic road barricades for shelter—unaware, or indifferent, likely both, that high-velocity assault rifle rounds would penetrate them.
“They fired a few shots, but not many. We dropped to the ground to take cover behind the barricades, then got up after a while and started moving toward the police again, who were stationed in the direction of the Ashulia police station. As we began to advance again, they started shooting once more. We dropped down again. We advanced and dropped down like this three times and after that the police opened fire into the crowd. This time they did not stop after a few rounds.”
It was after this third advance that Shanto crossed paths with Rasel Gazi on the Bipail highway.
“I dropped down again, and everyone at the front [did the same]. The people in the back began to run away. At that moment, I didn’t know Rasel bhai; he was just a few feet away from me, as I later realized. When I quickly lay down on the road, I saw that one person, who was Rasel, couldn’t get down in time and was shot. He was about 8 to 10 arm's lengths away from me on my right side. I witnessed Rasel bhai get shot, and he fell to the ground. I rushed to him immediately and picked him up, carrying him about 150 meters. After that distance, I managed to get a rickshaw and lifted Rasel bhai onto it with me.”
“How did you lift him up, how far away was the rickshaw, and did anyone help you?” we asked. Shanto explained that the process of lifting him was a blur. He could not recall how he got to the rickshaw, but did remember what happened afterward.
“Once I was on the rickshaw, I asked the people around me if anyone would volunteer to accompany me and help with Rasel bhai. One person stepped forward to help. While we were carrying him in the rickshaw, Rasel bhai kept asking, 'Brother, how long until we reach the hospital? It feels so bad.' We tried to console him. The rickshaw driver was kind and supportive. He pedaled as fast as he could to get us to the hospital.”
Shanto went from hospital to hospital with Rasel, searching for an open emergency room. The bullet had entered Rasel's abdomen and passed completely through his body. They moved from a local clinic to Gonoshasthaya Hospital.
“He couldn’t find a comfortable position and kept asking me to help him shift from one side to the other, but nothing seemed to work. As I was trying to help him, I noticed the hole on his back and realized that the bullet had exited through there. The doctors were sincere in their efforts. However, they likely made an honest mistake by only treating the wound on his belly without noticing the exit wound. By the time I brought this to their attention, they were already telling us he needed to be transferred to Dhaka Medical, so it didn’t matter at that point.”
By then, word was spreading that the Hasina government had collapsed.
“Rasel bhai was in very bad shape. He was bleeding from the mouth and in intense pain. Blood was coming out of his mouth like saliva. I was with him the whole time. The doctors bandaged him across the belly. Rasel bhai was holding my hand. He told me, ‘Please don’t go.’ I said that I will be here with you. I have a photo of when I was next to him, holding his hand.”
Shanto stayed by Rasel’s side until the family tracked them down, eventually accompanying them to Dhaka Medical College Hospital. Rasel died later that night.
The shared crucible
As we continued investigating individual cases, we noticed by mid-September that many of them were from July 19 alone. That realization led us to identify it as the second-deadliest day of the uprising.
A picture soon emerged from the testimonies and data compiled for individual cases. Victim after victim—from an office worker in Mohakhali to a grocery shop owner in Bosila to a father in Shantinagar trying to visit his son—was shot dead on July 19 and died within hours of the others.
With so many victims shot on a single day within a span of a few hours, the paths of unconnected victims and their family members inevitably crossed. The recorded statements capture those encounters, directly or indirectly.
The testimonies revealed shared ordeals: separate victims ending up in the same hospital or morgue, and quiet moments of ordinary heroism.
In Mohammadpur’s Bosila area, 45-year-old Md. Abu Shaed, a field-level BNP activist, left his family grocery store at 2:30 pm on July 19 to join the protests. Before leaving, when his mother-in-law warned him that people were being killed on the streets, Abu Shaed replied: “Amma, if we all just stay at home, then who will protest and fight for the country?”
Within 30 minutes, he was dead. His brother-in-law, Mohammad Delwar Hossain, ran past warning demonstrators through active gunfire to retrieve Shaed’s body from Momtaz Market. The back of Abu Shaed's skull was missing. Protesters lifted his body onto a rickshaw, placing the corpse directly onto Delwar’s lap for the harrowing 10-minute journey home.
Unlike Abu Shaed, who died instantly, many victims spent hours in debilitating pain, carrying bullets in their chests, abdomens, or thighs. For their families and rescuers, those same hours were spent in agonizing uncertainty as they navigated the streets trying to evade police and find medical care.
On July 19, reaching a hospital amid the brutal crackdown was an immense hurdle—and only the beginning of a deeply dehumanizing experience.
Before receiving care, the critically wounded and their families faced the threat of assault by ruling party activists or law enforcement. Even for those who made it inside, treatment was rarely guaranteed. Hospitals were not only overrun by bullet-wounded patients, but a number of medical facilities also turned victims away.
The cruelty of that afternoon is starkly illustrated across the cases we documented—for example, the case of Shakil, a 22-year-old sweet factory worker. After being shot in the right thigh near Bosila Bridge around dusk, Shakil was found by his elder brother, Rakib, inside a nearby building alongside three other bullet-wounded victims.
Because the Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) and police had completely blocked the main roads at the bridge, there was no way to transport the severely wounded using the primary routes; doing so meant certain arrest, being turned away, or worse.
To bypass the blockade, Rakib and others carrying the three bullet-wounded men scrambled beneath the bridge and took to the river by boat.
After landing at Gudaraghat, a boat terminal, they rushed Shakil by rickshaw to Popular Medical College Hospital in Dhanmondi, arriving around 8:30 pm. There, staff administered a saline drip but did not treat his wound, instead instructing the family to take him immediately to Dhaka Medical College Hospital (DMCH).
As Shakil began losing consciousness on the subsequent rickshaw ride, Rakib followed the doctor's instructions to blow air into his brother's mouth every three seconds. By the time they arrived at DMCH at 9:00 PM, Shakil was pronounced dead.
The case of Al Amin, a 23-year-old office support worker and Pathao driver from Mohakhali, further illustrates the crisis that overwhelmed Dhaka’s hospitals on July 19. Shot near the Mohakhali railgate under the flyover while participating in the protests, Al Amin was transferred to DMCH, where his younger brother, Abdur Rahim, found him gasping for air on a steel stretcher.
With no pillows available, Abdur Rahim sat on the floor for hours, supporting his dying brother’s head on his thigh. Al Amin desperately wanted to live; using a borrowed phone at 9:50 pm, he wept to his office Executive Director: “Sir, please save me. I will die. I may not live.”
Doctors at DMCH were forced to prioritize victims who stood a realistic chance of survival, leaving Al Amin largely unattended. A helpless Abdur Rahim managed to arrange an ambulance with the help of his brother’s employer and shuttled Al Amin to PG Hospital, where he was denied entry before being forced back to DMCH.
Because of this agonizing runaround, Al Amin’s bullet wounds went untreated for eight consecutive hours. After exhausting all options for treatment, 17-year-old Abdur Rahim could only sit there, watching his elder brother slowly slip away until doctors pronounced him dead at 12:10 am.
For families spared the agony of watching their loved ones die in emergency rooms or on the way to hospitals, a different form of cruelty awaited when they tried to collect the dead.
Amid the industrial-scale horror of July 19, those who spent hours scrambling between hospitals only to locate a relative in the DMCH morgue faced the gruelling challenge of getting the body released. Even before that, finding a relative meant searching through rows of bodies laid side by side across the packed DMCH morgue.
When Syed Khalilur Rahman, the maternal uncle of 40-year-old Nobin Talukdar, arrived at the DMCH morgue on July 19 to locate his nephew, the facility was so packed with freshly bleeding corpses that his feet became drenched in blood simply from standing on the floor.
Among those corpses was 26-year-old Robiul Islam. Though shot in entirely different parts of the city, both men ended up lying shoulder to shoulder on the same morgue floor.
Their families, grieving separately and unknown to one another, had each taken photographs of their relatives inside the morgue—neither realizing their pictures had captured both men. When shown the photograph during a later interview, Robiul’s brother, Rezaul, immediately recognized his brother lying inches from Nobin.
"Yes, that’s my brother," Rezaul said.
In turn, the photograph Rezaul’s family had taken that night captured Nobin’s body lying inches from his brother’s.
The scale and mechanics of this violence were systematically catalogued in the ITJP’s 70-page report analysing the killings of July 19. ITJP independently verified a baseline toll of at least 148 deaths on that single day.
The report anchored its findings in exhaustive forensic case studies of 32 individual killings—triangulating eyewitness accounts, video footage, and medical records. In doing so, it transformed a chaotic timeline of casualties into an organized record of state violence.
Dedicated documentation is not the media’s job
The July uprising dominated news coverage from the onset of state-sponsored violence in mid-July through the fall of Sheikh Hasina’s government. The deaths and injuries were covered extensively in the immediate post-Hasina period. While the need to document the atrocities quickly entered public discourse, little has been written about what that process entails in practice.
Journalistic coverage has immense documentary value, but it is outside the scope of a news organisation to undertake a thorough documentation process.
The case details described earlier in this article stem directly from ITJP’s investigation. Here, the contrast between journalistic coverage and dedicated evidence gathering becomes clear. Newsrooms inevitably move from one assignment to the next.
Even the highest-quality long-form journalism produced by leading Bangladeshi outlets—such as rigorous investigative documentaries released after the uprising—cannot fulfil the purpose of forensic documentation. It is simply not within a newsroom's operational scope.
When media outlets investigated the As Sabur case, for example, they uncovered valuable information and exposed evidence of police crimes. But a newsroom cannot afford to spend tens of hours investigating, cross-verifying, and building an evidentiary dossier on a single case—whereas a dedicated human rights investigation initiative can, as the ITJP has done.
The compiled data from such efforts creates a permanent repository that enables deeper, macro-level analysis. Data collected across individual victims paints an evidence-backed picture of institutional behaviour.
Case after case, testimonies recorded by the ITJP confirm that the violence deployed by law enforcement and party cadres was deliberate. They confirm that severely wounded victims were actively blocked from reaching hospitals. They detail how grieving relatives were forced to run from police station to police station to claim a body, facing threats of arrest along the way.
Yet even an investigation like ITJP’s documented only a fraction of the total cases. A vast amount of work remains. A systematic investigation into how medical treatment was deliberately denied, for example, remains one of the most important areas requiring documentation.
Likewise, broader investigations into the tens of thousands of non-lethal injuries inflicted by state-sponsored forces are essential to building a complete historical record.
The threat of revisionism
The need for rigorous documentation is self-evident. It is essential to preserving truth and ensuring accountability for crimes of this scale. Without high-quality documentary records, the history of these state-sponsored atrocities will remain vulnerable to revisionism.
Attempts to erase and distort history emerged swiftly, even before the wounded could leave their hospital beds. Awami League leaders and activists began floating conspiracy theories soon after the fall of the regime.
These narratives were peddled not only through social media but also amplified by the Indian media, casting doubt on the scale—or even the existence—of state violence. This included claims that opposition parties orchestrated the mass shootings to create a pretext for overthrowing the regime.
Even today, hardly a day passes without Awami League members in exile or the party’s sympathizers within the country publicly denying that the regime committed atrocities.
The most effective defence against these distortion campaigns is relentless, systematic documentation. The power of internationally accepted documentation became evident when the UN OHCHR report, published in February 2025, established an authoritative baseline of up to 1,400 people killed, providing a global shield against denialism.
Without the UN report, denialism would have gained far stronger ground. Highly structured, meticulous work carried out by independent international bodies using credible journalists, human rights investigators, and technical experts is the mechanism required to preserve the truth of the July uprising in a manner grounded in fact and free of ideological bias.
If the same quality and depth of investigation undertaken by the ITJP could be scaled across every killing, and extended to other state-sponsored crimes such as torture, mass arbitrary arrests, and enforced disappearances during the uprising, it would create an invaluable 360-degree historical record of this transformative era.
The ITJP met its core mandate with the resources available: building an evidentiary baseline for international legal accountability. However, relying on private, project-funded organizations is neither a reliable strategy nor a substitute for national record-keeping.
The conclusion of the ITJP project exposes this institutional gap. Independent, short-term initiatives—no matter how rigorous—cannot carry the permanent burden of national documentation. For Bangladesh, establishing a permanent, rigorous framework for this work is essential.
At the same time, July’s atrocities were the culmination, not the beginning, of systemic state violence. Extending this same rigorous documentation to crimes committed throughout the Awami League's 15-year rule remains equally essential.
Without sustained institutional efforts, the history of this era—and the July uprising that brought it to an end—will remain vulnerable to propaganda campaigns aimed at erasing the truth and exculpating perpetrators.
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Saqib Sarker is a journalist. He was a member of the ITJP team who investigated July Uprising killings