Regulation Act which significantly increased government control over the work of NGOs and threatened them with deregistration for making “inimical” or “derogatory” remarks against the Constitution or constitutional bodies. Several other bills that threatened freedom of expression were proposed in parliament, including the Digital Security Act and the Liberation War Denial Crimes Act. ENFORCED DISAPPEARANCES Enforced disappearances continued at an alarming rate, often of supporters of opposition parties Bangladesh National Party and Jamaat-e-Islami. Odhikar reported at least 90 people arrested by security forces and not heard from again. In August, three sons of prominent opposition politicians – Abdullahil Amaan Azmi, Mir Ahmed Bin Quasem and Hummam Qader Chowdhury – were arrested by men in plain clothes, some of whom identified themselves as police officers. The authorities continued to deny responsibility and the victims’ families were not informed of their whereabouts. ABUSES BY ARMED GROUPS Armed groups killed at least 32 people in targeted attacks in 2016, including secular activists, LGBTI people and religious minorities. Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB) and Ansar al-Islam, which respectively claimed allegiance to the armed groups Islamic State (IS) and al-Qa’ida, claimed the attacks. In April, Nazimuddin Samad became the sixth secular activist to be hacked to death in a targeted killing in less than two years. The editor of Roopbaan, Bangladesh’s only LGBTI magazine, and prominent LGBTI rights activist Xulhaz Mannan and his friend Tanay Mojumdar, were also killed by unidentified men. A range of human rights activists received threats from similar groups and said that the police did not offer enough protection, while others were reluctant to approach the police fearing they would be charged or harassed. In July, JMB gunmen stormed a restaurant in the capital, Dhaka, and killed at least 22 people, including 18 foreign nationals. Police Amnesty International Report 2016/17 responded with a heavy-handed “anti-terror” crackdown. At least 15,000 people were arrested, and human rights groups raised concerns that several thousand were politically motivated arrests of opposition supporters. Police said at least 45 suspected “terrorists” were killed in shoot-outs in the months following the July attack. Two of the surviving hostages from the attack were detained by police and held incommunicado for several weeks before being presented to court on 4 August. One of them, Hasnat Karim, was still held without charge at the end of the year. DEATH PENALTY Scores of people were sentenced to death and several were executed. In October, one alleged militant convicted of killing a judge in 2005 was executed. The government afterwards said that it would fast track the trials of people accused of crimes under the Anti-Terrorism Act which could lead to the death penalty, and that at least 64 people convicted under this Act since 1992 were on death row. The International Crimes Tribunal (ICT), a Bangladeshi court established to investigate the events of the 1971 independence war, sentenced at least six people to death. The proceedings were marked by severe irregularities and violations of fair trial rights, such as the arbitrary restriction of the number of defence witnesses allowed. Two people convicted of war crimes and crimes against humanity by the ICT were executed, both senior members of Jamaat-e-Islami − Motiur Rahman Nizami in May and Mir Quasem Ali in September. On 23 August a group of UN human rights experts expressed concern about the fairness of ICT trials, and urged the government to annul Mir Quasem Ali’s death sentence and grant him a retrial, stating that proceedings were “marred” by “irregularities”. TORTURE AND OTHER ILL-TREATMENT Torture and other ill-treatment in custody was widespread; however, complaints were rarely investigated. The 2013 Torture and Custodial 81