The border shootouts will dominate Bangladesh-India talks as the top home ministry officials from the two countries are set to meet here for a two-day session this week, reports said here today.
The border shootouts will dominate Bangladesh-India talks as the top home ministry officials from the two countries are set to meet here for a two-day session this week, reports said here today.
"There will be many issues on the table, but our main focus will be the non-stop killing of Bangladeshi citizens around the borders," home secretary Abdus Sobhan Sikder was quoted as saying by the Daily Star newspaper.
The paper quoted another senior home ministry official as saying that Dhaka would register a strong protest against the "killing of innocent Bangladeshi civilians" on the border as the two-day talks would start with the meeting of a joint working group tomorrow.
Paramilitary Bangladesh Rifles (BDR) chief Major Gen Rafiqul Islam last week told PTI the frontier force decided to refer the matter of the "trigger happiness" of India's Border Security Force to the home ministry with requests to take up the issue with the higher authorities in India.
"I am simply disappointed... as our (BDR) efforts to convince our counterparts to stop the killing visibly failed," he said.
Leading rights group 'Odhikar' earlier this month released a report claiming that 74 Bangladeshis were killed and 72 others injured on the frontiers in the past one year.
"Fifty of the dead were killed in shootout and 24 others were brutally tortured to death by BSF troops" along some 4,000-kilometers porous borders, it claimed but according to newspaper reports at least three more Bangladeshis were killed in the past 10 days since Odhikar published the report.
The BDR director general said the issue dominated his past two talks with his counterpart in BSF while "every time they assured us of looking into the matter as we asked them to follow the rules of engagement and arrest and return the trespassers instead of shooting them dead".
Officials, earlier said, the matter was also discussed during Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina's talks with her counterpart Manmohan Singh in January last year in New Delhi while she again raised the issue with the Indian premier on the sidelines of the SAARC summit in Thumphu later.
Hundreds of frontier villagers last week staged protests at northwestern Kurigram frontier after BSF men allegedly shot 15-year-old girl Falani as she was trying to return home from India, where she was engaged in a job.
Police and reports said Falani was shot in her right shoulder and died instantly as her clothes got entangled in the barbed wire fencing on the borders.
Home minister Sahara Khatun yesterday said that Bangladesh would raise the killing of Felani in the secretary-level talks.
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