The High Court (HC) today issued a rule upon the government to explain within four weeks why extra-judicial killings ‘in the name of crossfire or encounter’ should not be declared illegal.

The government is also to explain why departmental and criminal actions should not be taken against those who perpetrate such extra-judicial killings in custody and outside.

The bench of justices Syed Mahmud Hossain and Kamrul Islam Siddiqui asked the home secretary, the inspector general of police and the director general of Rapid Action Battalion to reply to the rule within four weeks. The rule came upon a public interest litigation by human-rights organisations Ain O Salish Kendra, Bangladesh Legal Aid and Services Trust and Karmojibi Nari.

In Dhaka alone, at least 10 people have been reported dead in recent weeks, in 'exchanges of gunfire' involving Rapid Action Battalion and police. These shooting incidents are commonly reported as 'crossfire' in the media, a term which in the past has also come to connote 'suspicious' or extra-judicial killings.

Most recently, controversy was sparked when two polytechnic students were killed in RAB 'crossfire' in the capital early this month. State minister for home Tanjim Ahmed had said the RAB had launched a departmental investigation into the death of the two students.

According to rights group Odhikar, 322 people were killed during the last two years of the caretaker government led by Fakhruddin Ahmed in "crossfire".

Prime minister Sheikh Hasina herself announced in February that the extrajudicial killings perpetrated during the tenure of the military-installed interim government would be investigated.

International and local rights groups, including Amnesty International, US-based Human Rights Watch, Transparency International, Bangladesh and Odhikar, over past decades have frequently expressed concern over the rate of extra-judicial killings in the country.

HRW, in May, in a damning report, suggested 'elite' security forces such as Rapid Action Battalion and the Directorate General of Forces Intelligence (DGFI) be disbanded.