The Abrar Fahad verdict and the politics of punishment

Abrar fahad was beaten to death inside Sher-e-Bangla Hall of Bangladesh University of Engineering Technology (BUET) in October 2019 after being questioned over his political views and suspected affiliation with Islami Chhatra Shibir.

His killing exposed a system of coercion that had become embedded in university halls, where activists of the then-ruling Awami League’s student wing exercised extraordinary power over other students. The brutality of the crime produced an equally powerful demand for punishment.

On December 8, 2021, Judge Abu Zafar Md Kamruzzaman of Dhaka’s Speedy Trial Tribunal-1 sentenced 20 defendants to death and five to life imprisonment. The High Court upheld all 25 sentences in March 2025. The case is still not over and appeals remain pending before the Appellate Division.

That unfinished legal process creates an opportunity to ask a difficult question without diminishing the horror of Abrar’s murder: Did the pursuit of justice sufficiently distinguish between the individual culpability of 25 defendants?

The question matters precisely because Abrar’s killing became such an important national event.

When a crime generates enormous public anger, courts operate under exceptional scrutiny. That does not mean judges necessarily succumb to public pressure. But the danger is evident. The question before a court can gradually move from what each defendant did to what punishment a horrified society expects.

In a death-penalty case, that distinction is fundamental.

A Facebook post attributed to Judge Kamruzzaman after the verdict has also circulated as evidence that he personally celebrated the severity of the judgment. Its authenticity and context should be independently established before conclusions are drawn from it. If authentic, however, such a public expression would raise a legitimate question about the appearance of judicial detachment. 

A judge deciding whether defendants should live or die is expected not only to be impartial but to maintain the appearance of distance from the public passions surrounding the case.

Again, this does not establish that the judgment was wrong. It does make the reasoning behind the allocation of responsibility especially important.

The politically useful body

Abrar’s murder cannot be separated from the political order in which it occurred.

According to the police investigation and subsequent court findings, Abrar was targeted after being suspected of involvement with Chhatra Shibir. His last Facebook post had also criticised agreements between Bangladesh and India. Investigators described a culture in which Bangladesh Chhatra League activists at BUET used intimidation and violence against students, including those who challenged them.

The allegation of being “Shibir” mattered because political identity had acquired consequences far beyond ordinary partisan disagreement.

Authoritarian systems rarely exercise coercion against everyone equally. They classify. Certain people become dissidents, extremists, traitors or security threats. Once a category is established as politically dangerous, treatment that would otherwise be unacceptable becomes easier to tolerate.

Michel Foucault described modern political power partly through its capacity to classify and discipline populations. Judith Butler later examined how political orders determine which lives are publicly recognised as “grievable.” Achille Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics went further, examining the sovereign power to determine who may be exposed to violence and death.

Abrar’s killing provides a particularly grim context in which to consider those ideas.

The suspicion that he belonged to Shibir helped turn a university student into a legitimate object of interrogation in the eyes of his attackers. The High Court itself observed that Abrar was tortured on suspicion of Shibir affiliation, while stressing that such an allegation could never justify what was done to him.

But there is another side to the politically useful body.

A body useful to an authoritarian system at one moment can become expendable at another.

The Chhatra League activists accused of killing Abrar belonged to the political organisation whose dominance on campuses had developed under the Awami League government. Yet once Abrar’s death generated nationwide outrage, protecting the accused became politically costly.

The state now faced a contradiction. The political system under which campus coercion had flourished was also responsible for demonstrating that Abrar would receive justice.

Punishment therefore carried two functions. It could hold perpetrators accountable. But it could also help the government distance itself from the political culture that had produced the crime. This is where penal populism becomes relevant.

A government facing public anger has a strong incentive to demonstrate decisiveness through visible punishment. The greater the outrage, the greater the political value of appearing uncompromising. Severe punishment becomes evidence that the state is functioning.

The politically useful body can consequently change roles. Yesterday it was useful because it intimidates opponents. Tomorrow it is useful because its punishment demonstrates the government’s commitment to justice.

Neither possibility proves that any particular defendant in the Abrar case was wrongly convicted. It does, however, make individualized judicial scrutiny indispensable.

When punishment becomes proof

The police investigation itself did not initially describe all 25 accused as performing identical acts.

Investigators said 11 were directly involved in the killing, while the others played different roles in the crime. The legal question was therefore never simply whether Abrar had been murdered by a group. It was also what each member of that group had done, intended, encouraged or knowingly allowed to happen.

The distinction becomes particularly important in the case of Morshed Amartya Islam.

His father, Rabiul Islam, has maintained that Morshed tried to help Abrar rather than participate actively in the assault. When Morshed surrendered in January 2020, Rabiul said he had brought his son before the court because he respected the law and wanted justice for Abrar.

His more consequential claim concerned what happened inside the hall.

Rabiul said Morshed wanted to give Abrar water and take him to a doctor, but Mehedi Hasan Robin prevented him from doing so. Contemporary reporting on the charge sheet provides some support for at least part of this account: it states that Morshed and another student, Moaz Abu Horayra, told Robin that Abrar needed to be taken to hospital because of his deteriorating condition. Robin reportedly dismissed the suggestion.

That does not establish Morshed’s innocence.

A father has an obvious personal interest in defending his son. Nor does an attempt to obtain medical treatment necessarily erase responsibility for conduct that occurred before it. The entire evidentiary record — actions, presence, knowledge, intent, communications and participation — must determine culpability.

But that is precisely the point.

If one defendant planned the interrogation, another wielded a cricket stump, another guarded the room, another encouraged the assault and another attempted to take Abrar to a hospital, those facts cannot simply disappear inside the category of “Abrar’s killers.”

Criminal law exists in part to make such distinctions. The High Court ultimately took a broad view of shared responsibility. In its full judgment, it held that defendants who were present but did not themselves beat Abrar could still bear responsibility because they failed to intervene.

There may be a sound legal basis for assigning criminal liability in such circumstances. But criminal liability and proportional punishment are not necessarily the same question. And when the punishment is death, distinctions of conduct, intent and degree of participation become even more consequential.

There were also disputes over the conduct of the original trial.

In December 2020, 22 accused filed a no-confidence petition against Judge Kamruzzaman. Their lawyers alleged that prosecution testimony had not been properly recorded during cross-examination and sought to have the case transferred. Prosecutors rejected the accusations and argued that the application was intended to delay the proceedings.

The High Court subsequently rejected the transfer petition. These allegations therefore should not be presented as established judicial misconduct. They remain defence allegations.

But their existence reinforces the need for care in describing the case. Abrar’s murder generated an understandable public desire for an exemplary verdict. The trial court itself said the highest punishment was being imposed so that such a killing would not recur.

That rationale deserves examination.

Courts punish individuals for crimes they have committed. Deterrence is a legitimate consideration in sentencing, but exemplary punishment becomes dangerous if the desire to send a social message begins to obscure differences between defendants.

Twenty death sentences can look like decisive justice. They can also make individualized reasoning more important, not less. 

This is especially true in an authoritarian setting. The Awami League government had a political interest in showing that it could punish those responsible for a crime that had become an indictment of its own campus political system. The state could condemn the perpetrators while leaving the structure that empowered them substantially outside the dock.

The result is a strange political economy of punishment. The state demonstrates strength by punishing individuals produced by a system of political coercion, while the system itself avoids comparable scrutiny.

That is why the number of convictions cannot itself be evidence of the quality of justice. Nor can the severity of punishment.

The only meaningful test is whether the evidence established the culpability of each defendant beyond the required legal threshold and whether the sentence imposed on each was proportionate to that culpability.

Justice without reproducing trauma

None of this requires rehabilitating the politics behind Abrar’s murder.

His killing remains one of the clearest examples of how partisan control of university spaces can become violent. A student was interrogated, beaten for hours and left dying because other students believed they possessed the political authority to police his beliefs.

The confidence of the attackers is itself revealing. This was not violence committed in secrecy by people immediately terrified of discovery. According to the investigation, the assault unfolded over hours inside a university residence. Abrar’s political identity was discussed openly. Other students moved through the hall. Decisions were made about whether he should receive medical treatment.

Such behaviour suggests an environment in which the perpetrators believed that coercive authority belonged to them. That is the institutional failure at the core of the case. A justice system concerned only with punishing the final perpetrators risks missing it.

Abrar became vulnerable because a political culture had made certain forms of campus intimidation routine and had turned accusations of ideological disloyalty into grounds for coercion. Punishing the students responsible for his death was necessary. But executing 20 people cannot by itself dismantle the political arrangements that allowed such power to develop.

Nor should concern for due process be mistaken for indifference toward Abrar. The opposite is true.

Justice for a murder victim is weakened, not strengthened, if the legal process creates reasonable doubts about whether everyone received punishment corresponding to his actual conduct. The legitimacy of a verdict does not come from satisfying the largest possible constituency. It comes from the precision with which the law distinguishes guilt.

Abrar’s family has lived for seven years with the consequences of an exceptionally brutal crime. His parents have continued to wait for the case to reach its final conclusion. As of October 2026, appeals remain before the Appellate Division and the final hearing has yet to begin.

The families of the convicted men live with another reality. Twenty have sons facing execution. Five have sons sentenced to spend decades in prison. Their suffering does not cancel the suffering of Abrar’s family, and it cannot determine guilt. But neither should it be dismissed as irrelevant when the justice system still has another level of review available.

The task before the Appellate Division is not to reconcile two sets of grieving parents. Courts cannot do that. It is to determine the law and evidence with sufficient precision that the distinction between justice and vengeance remains visible.

Bangladesh is also politically different from the country in which the trial-court verdict was delivered. An elected government now holds office after the February 2026 election. Its responsibility is not to decide whether the 25 defendants are guilty, nor to use the case to reverse the political narratives of the previous government.

Its responsibility is simpler…leave the judiciary alone.

The final appellate process should be protected from the same forces that can distort any politically charged trial — government interest, partisan pressure, media judgment and public demands for predetermined outcomes.

Abrar should not again become a politically useful body, this time for a different political order. Neither should the convicted men. That is the broader lesson of the case.

Under the system that produced Abrar’s murder, political identity helped determine whose body could be subjected to violence. After his death, there was a different danger: that the bodies of the accused could acquire political value through the severity of their punishment.

A credible justice system must reject both propositions.

It should ask what each defendant did. What did he know? What did he intend? Did he assault Abrar? Did he order others to do so? Did he facilitate the violence? Did he stand by while it happened? Did he try to stop it? And what punishment does the proven conduct justify?

Those questions are less emotionally satisfying than a collective judgment. They are also the questions on which criminal justice depends. The choice is therefore not between justice for Abrar and justice for the accused. There can be only one standard of justice.

It must recognise the enormity of Abrar Fahad’s murder without allowing that enormity to substitute for evidence against any individual defendant. It must recognise his family’s right to accountability while protecting the defendants’ right to individualized judgment. And where the state seeks the irreversible punishment of death, it must demand the highest possible confidence that those distinctions have been made correctly.

Otherwise, a case that began with the political devaluation of one young man’s life risks ending with another failure to distinguish carefully between bodies and punishment.

That would not complete the justice Abrar’s death demanded. It would reproduce the logic that made such injustice possible in the first place.

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The writers work for All Victims & Veterans Network (AVN), a research- and advocacy-based human rights organization