New Delhi, July 12 -- DHAKA - Mohammed Suman was 17 when he slipped away to attend a political rally his country had banned. His family reported him missing within hours. Two weeks later his body surfaced from the Turag River, alongside two others who had disappeared after attending a gathering of the Awami League, the party that governed Bangladesh for sixteen years before its leader fled the country.

That death, in June, is one of 66 politically-related killings that Bangladesh's leading rights organization has documented in the six months since Prime Minister Tarique Rahman took office in February. Ain o Salish Kendra, a rights watchdog active since 1990, counted 11 extrajudicial killings and 61 deaths in police custody across that pe...