Aim to Blind

The gun that killed Abu Sayed wasn’t meant for people. Shotguns loaded with birdshot were built for hunters, with cartridges packed with hundreds of tiny metal pellets designed to scatter wide enough to bring down something small and fast-moving in flight.

During July 2024, hundreds more Bangladeshis were shot with the same weapon. Not only in the chest but also in the eyes. Some lost one eye. Some lost the light. None of them was given a choice in the matter.

The scale, in numbers and the wounds

The UN OHCHR fact-finding report put the death toll from the crackdown at up to 1,400, with more than 13,500 injured. Of the deaths examined in detail, roughly 12% were caused specifically by shotguns loaded with metal pellets, a smaller share than military rifles. Specifically, the weapons that caused the devastating, catastrophic situation were 12-gauge pump-action shotguns. But pellets tell a different story when you stop counting the dead and start counting the blind.

Hospitals across Dhaka reported more than 1,300 eye-injury cases in total, 630 of which required surgery, and more than 90% of those patients lost vision in one or both eyes. At the National Institute of Ophthalmology and Hospital (NIOH) alone, 856 people came through the doors with pellet wounds; 382 lost vision in one eye and 19 in both.

And the toll kept climbing. Dr Khair Ahmed Choudhury, who took over as NIOH's director weeks after the crackdown and continued treating patients for more than a year afterwards, now puts the number even higher: 11 patients who lost both eyes, and close to 450 who lost one. He said, “We, the doctors and nurses, worked day and night. There were even instances where some doctors remained at the hospital for nearly 72 hours.” It clearly explained the extreme situation that had to be handled in NIOH.

The difference was not only the number.

It was the wounds. “Most of the injuries were pellet injuries, gunshot injuries,” Dr Khair said. “These were not rubber bullets. These were metallic bullets.”

Photojournalist Sultan Mahmud Mukut was covering the protests from the ground. On July 19, when he went to Dhaka Medical College Hospital after Friday prayers, he saw casualty after casualty arriving with what he described as headshots. “Most of them were headshots,” he recalled. He began noticing that many of the injured were losing their eyes.

From birds to batons

A shotgun cartridge releases hundreds of pellets that spread in a cone, useful for hunters who don’t need pinpoint accuracy when targeting moving game. At close range, however, the pellets remain tightly clustered, concentrating force that can penetrate skin, muscle, bone and the eye socket, exposing the danger obscured by the term "less-lethal".

David Bruce, a South African policing researcher who has spent over a decade studying crowd-control weapons, helped write an official government panel report in 2016 that formally rejected the term "non-lethal" for precisely this reason. Nutshell Today reached out to him to understand his thoughts on this. Speaking about the dangers of these projectiles, Bruce said, “There is a range of about maybe up to six or seven meters where these projectiles that the police here use can be lethal.” Beyond that, he said, "Up to about 40 meters, they can maybe hurt people, but they don't generally cause very serious injury at that range.”

These weapons are less lethal than a rifle, not harmless. What was designed to bring down a bird can shatter an eye socket just as easily.

Bangladesh had used this weapon before quietly

Pellet-firing shotguns first appeared against Bangladeshi protesters in 2018, during student demonstrations over road safety and quota reform, pitched then as "minimum force". Some protesters lost eyes even then, but the incidents drew little sustained attention. By October 2023, during a BNP rally demanding Hasina's resignation, police were reportedly firing pellets from rooftops, hitting bystanders in the head and face. Still, it stayed a secondary tool. But those weren’t that devastating. Dr Khair said, “I was at the Institute of Ophthalmology in 2018, but we didn't really receive pellet injuries of this kind, not even before the '24 election.”

By July 2024, it wasn't. Police units carried short-barreled shotguns capable of firing cartridges loaded with up to 200 pellets each, alongside rubber-bullet cartridges, and officers had wide discretion over which to use, and when. Trade records show Bangladesh's police force had bought more than four million metal-pellet cartridges and over 25,000 shotguns in the two years before the uprising, a stockpile built well ahead of any protest, ahead even of the January 2024 election.

A pattern that keeps repeating, everywhere

Bangladesh did not invent this. Kashmir offers the closest parallel: Indian security forces introduced pellet-firing shotguns for crowd control in 2010, and after the 2016 killing of militant Burhan Wani, more than 6,000 people were reportedly injured by pellets in a single year, which is officially classified, as in Bangladesh, as non-lethal.

During the 2019–2020 Chilean protests, known as the Estallido Social (Social Outburst), riot police fired what were called "rubber pellets" directly into crowds. This caused more than 400 documented eye injuries, leaving many with ruptured eyeballs or permanent blindness.

Peru offers a sharper parallel still. During the 2022–23 protests there, police used lead pellets against demonstrators despite the fact that their own internal regulations prohibited that exact ammunition. At least three deaths were directly attributed to it. The weapon wasn't just dangerous; it was banned, and used anyway.

And in Bahrain, the closest single case to Abu Sayed anywhere in the world: in 2011, Fadhil al-Matrook was killed by birdshot at close range, unarmed, posing no threat. The officers were acquitted two years later, a court finding no "intention to use lethal force."

Similar patterns of pellet and rubber-round injuries have been documented in Iran's 2022 "Woman, Life, Freedom" movement, in Palestine, going back to the First Intifada, and in Colombia, where anti-riot police (the ESMAD) caused 169 recorded eye injuries between 1999 and 2022. The pattern is old and global.

Was this an accident, or the plan?

From the OHCHR report itself, based on video-forensic analysis (not testimony alone):

“Videos often showed police firing multiple shotgun rounds in quick succession, pointing at the torso and head level of close-by crowds or, where crowds were further away, shooting at a slightly elevated angle to ensure that the metal pellets would still hit people over longer distances.” Eyewitness accounts also described snipers stationed on rooftops, aiming for the faces of fleeing demonstrators 

Dr Khair saw the same pattern from the operating table. NIOH had seen in past unrest: injuries typically landed on the lower body, below the knee. This time, the wounds concentrated on the chest, neck, face, and head. Some patients carried 30 to 70 embedded pellets above the collarbone alone, a density he called clinically "abnormal".

His own conclusion: “The pattern indicates it may have been targeted with the intention of causing them permanent disability, or to kill them."

The specific incidents support both of them. In Gazipur on August 5, a 14-year-old boy was shot in the hand and maimed at close range after the shooter told him, "You won't use this hand to throw stones again." Over 40 pellets were later found in his body. In Narsingdi on July 18, a 15-year-old already lying incapacitated on the ground was shot again and killed.

Tanvir Hasan Zoha, a former ICT prosecutor, said, “When hundreds of people emerge from the same crackdown with devastating eye injuries, it is no longer sufficient to examine each injury as an isolated accident.”

None of this fits the UN's own guidance for how these weapons are supposed to be used. International standards say kinetic impact projectiles should be aimed only at the lower abdomen or legs, warning explicitly that targeting the face or head "may result in skull fracture and brain injury; damage to the eyes, including permanent blindness; or even death. " Formal IGP Baharul Alam said officers are trained practically on how and where to fire, adding that they are taught to aim “always below the belt". Bangladesh's own police regulations, dating to 1943, separately prohibit firing over a crowd's heads or at anyone outside the immediate gathering—rules the elevated-angle pattern and the rooftop shootings broke directly, under Bangladesh's own law, not just international norms. Baharul Alam added that, under the traditional riot-control drill, “ first there is a warning, then gas; when they come closer, baton; and when there is a threat to life, then weapon for self-defence."

And according to officials who later spoke to UN investigators, none of this ever officially counted as lethal force in the first place. Pellet-loaded shotguns were not classified as lethal weapons by Bangladeshi law enforcement. A technicality that left individual officers free to use them however they chose, while the state could describe the entire operation as restrained.

Mohaimin Pulok, a victim of the Ocular Aggression during july revolution, commented that "In Bangladesh, this was an absolutely systematic plan and a completely strategic tactic to blind the protestors, and it was done very deliberately."

Table shows procurement details by law enforcement agencies comparing the AL and interim eras.

The pattern that connects the dots

According to an analysis by the Omega Research Foundation, a UK-based human rights organisation, between October 2022 and July 2024, in the two years preceding the uprising (2022–2023), Bangladesh law enforcement agencies purchased more than 4 million metal-pellet shotgun cartridges and more than 25,000 shotguns. The scale and timing of this procurement, ahead of the 2024 election, suggest that the use of metal pellet ammunition was not a response to sudden disorder but formed part of an intentional policing strategy to suppress dissent by inflicting serious injury and death.

Asked directly what that sudden surge in the procurement indicates, David said: "Either it's malicious and punitive in its motivation or at the very least it's extremely reckless”, and suggests a complete indifference to the potential impact of using that ammunition.

What comes next

There's a name for what researchers believe is happening here. Some call it the "right to maim", the idea that injury, not death, can function as a deliberate instrument of state power, precise enough to punish and silence without producing a body the public has to reckon with. Zoha said, “ An eye is an exceptionally vulnerable organ. An injury that may not immediately kill someone can permanently blind or disfigure that person. ” Mukut arrived at the same idea on his own, watching it happen for two years: “Killing a protester risks making a martyr. Blinding one doesn't.”

But now the question remains. Who decided that this level of injury was acceptable, who knew what was happening and was responsible for and who had the authority to stop it?

Nutshell Today is trying to unravel those questions through this series. In this first part, we tried to connect the dots, from the weapons and ammunition to the injuries and the patterns documented during the crackdown.

But the dots do not end here. Behind the numbers, there are thousands of lives that were changed, and questions that remain unanswered long after the guns fell silent. In the next two parts, we will follow up on those unanswered questions and look at what happened after the shooting stopped and what comes next.