UN team in Bangladesh to assess rights violations

A United Nations team arrived in Bangladesh Thursday to assess whether to investigate alleged human rights violations committed during the recent student-led protests that ended the 15-year-rule of Sheikh Hasina.

More than 450 people were killed -- most by police fire -- during the weeks leading up to Hasina's ouster on August 5, when she fled by helicopter to neighbouring India.

The UN rights office had said in a preliminary report last week that there were "strong indications, warranting further independent investigation, that the security forces used unnecessary and disproportionate force" during the protests.

"Alleged violations included extrajudicial killings, arbitrary arrests and detention, enforced disappearances, torture and ill-treatment," it added.

The advance team in the country now will look into the "modalities for investigating human rights violations", the rights office said in a statement Thursday.

"Depending on the discussions, a separate fact-finding team may be deployed in the coming weeks to conduct the investigation," the UN's Dhaka office said in a statement of its own.

Bangladesh's interim leader Muhammad Yunus has said his administration would "provide whatever support" UN investigators need.

Hasina's government was accused of widespread abuses, including the mass detention and extrajudicial killing of political opponents.

Separately, a Bangladeshi war crimes tribunal set up by Hasina has launched three "mass murder" probes into its founder over the recent unrest.

All three cases were brought by private individuals, and several of Hasina's former top aides have also been named.

Floods swamp Bangladesh

Floods triggered by torrential rains have swamped a swath of low-lying Bangladesh, disaster officials said Thursday, adding to the new government's challenges after weeks of political turmoil.

At least two people have died and hundreds of thousands are stranded in the floods in at least eight districts in southern and eastern areas.

"Around 2.9 million people have been affected and more than 70,000 people have been taken to shelters," Mohammad Nazmul Abedin, senior official in the Ministry of Disaster Management and Relief, told AFP.

Long-time premier Sheikh Hasina quit as prime minister this month and fled to India after weeks of deadly student-led protests, ending her 15-year autocratic rule.

The South Asian nation of 170 million people, crisscrossed by hundreds of rivers, has seen frequent floods in recent decades.

It is among the countries most vulnerable to disasters and climate change, according to the Global Climate Risk Index.

The annual monsoon rains cause widespread destruction every year, but climate change is shifting weather patterns and increasing the number of extreme weather events.

The army and the navy have been deployed, with speedboats and helicopters rescuing those stranded by the swollen rivers.

Much of the country is made up of deltas where the Himalayan rivers the Ganges and the Brahmaputra wind towards the sea after coursing through India.

- 'Heaviest rains' -

Neighbouring India's foreign ministry rejected accusations it was to blame for the floods, denying it had deliberately released water from an upstream dam.

It said the catchment area had experienced the "heaviest rains of this year over the last few days", and that the flow of water downstream was due to "automatic releases".

Asif Mahmud, a key leader of the student protests that ousted Hasina, and now the sports minister in the interim cabinet, had accused India of not only hosting Hasina, but of "creating a flood" by deliberately releasing water from dams.

India said that was "factually not correct".

"Floods on the common rivers between India and Bangladesh are a shared problem inflicting sufferings to people on both sides, and requires close mutual cooperation towards resolving them," New Delhi's foreign ministry said in a statement.

Hasina's rule saw widespread human rights abuses, including the mass detention and extrajudicial killings of her political opponents.

But Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Hindu-nationalist government preferred Hasina over her rivals from the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, which it saw as closer to conservative Islamist groups.

Modi has offered his support to the new Bangladeshi leader Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus, who is heading the caretaker administration.