Bangladesh President rules out resigning

BANGLADESH: Bangladesh's embattled President Iajuddin Ahmed said he will not bow to mounting pressure to resign, his advisor said.

The president told the US ambassador in Bangladesh such a suggestion was "unrealistic and impractical" and "will not happen", said Mukhlesur Rahman Chowdhury, the advisor to the president.

His comments came a day after the opposition demanded his ouster, accusing him of rigging polls slated for next month, according to his advisor.

The US ambassador Patricia Butenis raised the issue when she met the president at his palace, Chowdhury told reporters.

The opposition, led by Awami League leader Sheikh Hasina Wajed, is demanding that Iajuddin step down as head of the caretaker government, saying fair elections are impossible with him at the helm.

The opposition accuses the caretaker government, headed by Ahmed, of seeking to tilt elections set for January 23 in favour of the outgoing right-of-centre Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP).

The president's "real aim is to serve the BNP," a leader of the main opposition Awami League, Amir Hossain Amu, told a rally of 10,000 protestors on Tuesday.

Meanwhile Bangladesh's elite security force has killed more than 350 people in custody and could be used by the country's former ruling party ahead of next month's election, a U.S.-based human rights group warned on Thursday.

A 79-page Human Rights Watch report said the Rapid Action Battalions were also responsible for widespread torture that included beatings, boring holes in suspects with electric drills and giving them electric shocks.

It is the second time in as many days the Rapid Action Battalions - created to fight Islamic militants and crime - have been slammed, with New Delhi-based Asian Center for Human Rights slating Bangladesh as South Asia's worst rights abuser.

"Bangladesh's Rapid Action Battalion has become a government death squad," said Brad Adams, Human Rights Watch's Asia director. "Its methods are illegal and especially shameful to a nation whose citizen just won the Nobel prize for peace."

Muhammad Yunus won the 2006 peace prize with the Grameen Bank he founded to lend money to the poor of Bangladesh.

Officials at the Bangladesh Embassy were not immediately available for comment.

Bangladesh government officials have said the government has given the elite security force a mandate to kill suspected criminals instead of making arrests and even drafted a list of most-wanted criminals to kill, Human Rights Watch said.

Dhaka, New York, Thursday, AFP