Police in Bangladesh have arrested one person and are looking for nine others suspected of killing a forest officer after he caught them illegally excavating soil in a protected area of the country’s southern Cox’s Bazar district. The incident highlights what experts say is a worrying trend of law enforcement failing to keep up with intensifying pressure from illegal resource extraction.
Sajjaduzzaman, 30, a beat officer with the Cox’s Bazar South Forest Division, was responding to reports of illegal soil quarrying in a hilly reserve in the Ukhia area in the early hours of March 31. The group of men digging up the hill struck Sajjaduzzaman and his motorcycle driver with their dump truck during the confrontation, killing the officer and seriously injuring the driver.
“The Forest Department filed a case against 10 miscreants a day after the incident, and police have already arrested one person,” Bipul Krishna Das, conservator of forests for the Chattogram division where Cox’s Bazar is located, told Mongabay.
Das said the department is taking necessary measures to bring the people involved in the incident to justice and monitoring the situation carefully. This was echoed on April 3 by Bangladesh’s environment minister, Saber Hossain Chowdhury, who told reporters that the necessary legal initiatives have been taken to ensure exemplary punishment for the suspects.
“Those who are involved in the killing will be brought to justice, ensuring maximum punishment for them,” he added.
Attacks on forest officers by people found illegally logging, quarrying, hunting or carrying out other forms of natural resource extraction are a long-running problem in Bangladesh, with around 140 officers attacked in the country over the past five years.
“Encroachers are becoming more desperate nowadays in Cox’s Bazar,” Md. Sarwar Alam, who heads the divisional forest office where Sajjaduzzaman was stationed, told Mongabay. “In September 2023, a gang of grabbers who smuggled soil from a reserve forest carried out an attack on forest officials, too, leaving 10 injured. Of them, one was critically injured and sent to a hospital in Chattogram City for better treatment.”
He added that forest officers had been attacked 16 times in Cox’s Bazar in the past year, and that while the Forest Department is conducting regular patrols of protected forests, the pressure for resources such as wood and soil is intensifying.
“Hills and forests here are being grabbed due to excessive human pressure. Forcibly displaced Rohingyas, who now took shelter in Cox’s Bazar camps, are contributing to the rapid depletion of reserved forests,” Sarwar said.
According to Forest Department data, 28,542 people had encroached onto reserve forests in Cox’s Bazar, illegally occupying 13,348 hectares (32,984 acres) — the most of any of Bangladesh’s 64 districts. The same data show a total of 88,215 people have encroached onto a combined 56,095 hectares (138,614 acres) of reserve forest across the country.
Sarwar said the Forest Department is struggling to protect forests because it lacks enough manpower. “It is not possible for the department to save the forests alone.” He suggested forming a joint task force with other law enforcement agencies to conduct eviction drives against encroachers.
“Speedy trial tribunals should be formed to dispose of the forest-related cases,” Sarwar said, citing provisions under a 2002 law that allow for trials to be expedited en masse. This way, he added, “positive results will come to this end. It will pave ways to ensure exemplary punishments for forest encroachers too.”
Syeda Rizwana Hasan, chief executive of the Bangladesh Environmental Lawyers Association (BELA), agreed that the government needs to take a more coordinated approach to encroachers, saying they’ve become increasingly organized. She called on the land administration and police to cooperate with the Forest Department in protecting the forests and their resources, and suggested the environment ministry could prepare a list of known encroachers to send to district authorities for follow-up action.
“Local administrations always put pressure on the Forest Department when the issue of forest entrenchment arises. So protection must be given to the forest officials,” Rizwana said, adding that instructions should be given simultaneously to local administrations, enforcement agencies, and others concerned about cooperating with the Forest Department to protect forests.
Krishna, the Chattogram forest conservator, suggested strengthening the existing Forest Conservation Act and not leasing any quarrying concessions close to forest areas.
Rafiqul Islam is an environment and development journalist based in Dhaka, Bangladesh. He has been reporting on the environment, climate change, conservation, development and human rights.
