Bangladesh just arrested 11,600 people in 6 days

(Image credit: STR/Getty Images)

published 18 June 2016

Bangladesh arrested 11,600 people less than a week after announcing a new initiative against Islamic extremism within its borders. But only 2 percent of those detained — just 177 people — are actually accused of dangerous radicalism, and none are considered high-ranking terrorist operatives.

This discrepancy has led to accusations that the South Asian nation may be using the risk of extremism as an excuse for squashing legitimate political opposition to the ruling party. Bangladesh "should immediately stop arbitrarily arresting people without proper evidence of crime," Human Rights Watch said in a statement released Friday, noting that some reports suggest "some of those detained are being made to pay bribes to secure their release."

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.

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