Shoot Me, I Bare My Chest: The Killing of Abu Sayed

In the summer of 2024, Bangladesh was rocked by a series of anti-government protests that would come to be known as the July Revolution. What began as student-led demonstrations calling for reforms to the government’s controversial job-quota system grew rapidly into a nationwide uprising in response to the ruling party’s efforts to suppress the first wave of protests through authoritarian crackdowns and escalating violence.

A UN report estimates that as many as 1,400 people were killed during these protests, by police, paramilitary forces, and members of the student wing of the Awami League, Bangladesh’s ruling party.

On 16 July 2024, during one of the deadliest weeks of the uprising, a student at Begum Rokeya University in Rangpur, Abu Sayed, was fatally shot by police during a protest outside the university campus. His death, and the circumstances surrounding it, soon became a symbol of resistance against the Bangladeshi state’s disproportionate use of force in response to the protests. The slogan ‘Buk petechi guli kor’ (‘Shoot me, I bare my chest’), which had emerged within a nationwide movement against sexual violence in 2020, came to also stand for Sayed’s death and all it represented, signalling his defiant posture—arms spread, chest bared—in the moments before he was shot.

By the time the protests began, the Awami League had been in power since 2009 under the rule of Sheikh Hasina, whose control over political institutions, including the judiciary and security sectors, had expanded steadily during her time in office. Sheikh Hasina’s tenure was characterised by a growing climate of fear and repression, as surveillance, harassment, and extrajudicial violence became normalised.

Her government’s reinstatement of a controversial quota system for public sector jobs—which proposed to allocate one-third of government jobs to descendants of the veterans of Bangladesh’s ‘Liberation War’ of 1971—came against a backdrop of heightened income inequality and growing discontent with the corruption, cronyism, and resulting lack of opportunity for young people seeking employment. The quota system was widely criticised for perpetuating systemic inequalities, however, as the demonstrations expanded, so too did the focus of protesters’ frustrations, to also include the militarisation of public life, economic precarity exacerbated by government policies, and the suppression of free speech and dissent.

In response to the growth of the student-led protest movement, the Chhatra League—the student wing of the Awami League, which already played a significant role in campus politics across the country—were accused of attacking peaceful demonstrators, sometimes in apparent coordination with law enforcement. As the demonstrations grew further, the government mobilised armed police units and paramilitary forces, whose use of lethal munitions resulted in hundreds of deaths in the week of 15 July alone, followed by mass arrests.

Despite the government’s efforts to intimidate and delegitimise the protest movement, on 5 August—or ‘36 July’, as revolutionaries later called it—Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina was forced to resign, and flee the country. The protests had united many disparate subsets of the population in their demand for justice and opposition to the socioeconomic and political systems that had marginalised many for decades and threatened the futures of many more.

Our investigation found that during the protest on 16 July 2024, police fired at Abu Sayed from a distance of 14.2m, using lead birdshot designed for hunting. Sayed was shot in the chest and face, and subsequently succumbed to his injuries.

A digital reconstruction of the moment Abu Sayed was first shot by police officers (Forensic Architecture, 2025)

Moments before his death, Abu Sayed was photographed standing before the police, arms stretched wide in defiance. This image of Sayed has become a potent symbol of the state’s violent suppression of dissent, during one of the most politically charged periods in Bangladesh’s recent history.

Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina made three claims regarding the death of Abu Sayed:

1. He was killed by a rock thrown by fellow protesters;
2. Police only used rubber bullets during the incident;
3. Protesters took 4–5 hours to take him to the hospital, and their negligence contributed to his death.

These assertions originate from two primary sources: a video posted by the Awami League’s official Facebook page, and a leaked phone call, posted to YouTube and widely circulated, both containing audio attributed to Sheikh Hasina.

During this time, many protesters were preemptively deleting any photos or videos they had taken at the ‘July protests’, out of fear of reprisals. However, with the support of the Drik Picture Library, we were able to gather sufficient visual material to interrogate the claims made by Sheikh Hasina, and the circumstances of Sayed’s death.