Feb. 12 (UPI) -- Bangladesh's former government systematically committed "serious human rights violations" against student-led protesters, with as many as 1,400 people killed and thousands of others injured, the U.N. Human Rights Office said Wednesday. Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina fled by helicopter to India before crowds stormed her residence on Aug. 5, 2024. Muhammad Yunus, 84, a Nobel laureate known as the "banker to the poor" and critic of Hasina, became leader of the interim government. Hasina, who named by Time magazine on the top 100 list in 2018, began her reign in January 2009. The High Court's decision to reinstate a quota system in public service jobs led to the protests. The 114-page report said more than 11,700 people were detained. The report included testimony from senior Bangladesh officials and other evidence showing an official policy to attack and to violently repress anti-government protesters and sympathizers. "The brutal response was a calculated and well-coordinated strategy by the former Government to hold onto power in the face of mass opposition," Human rights chief Volker Turk said. "There are reasonable grounds to believe hundreds of extrajudicial killings, extensive arbitrary arrests and detentions, and torture, were carried out with the knowledge, co-ordination and direction of the political leadership and senior security officials as part of a strategy to suppress the protests." The report estimates up to 13% of the those killed between between July 1 and Aug. 15 were children. "The testimonies and evidence we gathered paint a disturbing picture of rampant State violence and targeted killings, that are amongst the most serious violations of human rights, and which may also constitute international crimes,"Turk said. "Accountability and justice are essential for national healing and for the future of Bangladesh." Security forces allegedly denied or obstructed critical medical care for injured protesters, interrogated patients and collected their fingerprints in hospitals. The U.N. agency said there "were rooted in much broader grievances arising from destructive and corrupt politics and governance that had entrenched economic inequalities. To remain in power, the former Government tried systematically to suppress these protests with increasingly violent means." The UN Human Rights Office in September dispatched a team to Bangladesh, including human rights investigators, a forensics physician and a weapons expert. Women, including protest leaders, were subjected to arbitrary arrests, torture and ill-treatment and attacks by security forces and Awami League supporters, according to the report. It included threats of rape. Also, police and other security forces killed and maimed children, and detained them in inhumane conditions and torture. A 12-year-old protester in Dhanmondi died from internal bleeding caused by some 200 metal shot pellets, according to the report. Also killed were young children brought by their parents to protests, or who were shot as bystanders. A 6-year-old girl was killed by a bullet to the head while standing on her building's roof observing violent clashes. On the final day of protests, a 12-year-old boy shot by the police in Azampur recalled that police were "firing everywhere like rainfall." He said he saw at least a dozen dead bodies. At least 24 people died in eastern Bangladesh after anti-government protesters set fire to a hotel on Aug. 6 owned by a senior figure in the Awami League of Hasina. Mohammad Ali Arafat, a former minister in Sheikh Hasina's cabinet who negotiated with demonstrators, rejected the report's findings, calling it "preposterous" to suggest she had ordered protest leaders to be killed. "The problem with relying on 'testimonies' from unnamed security officials at this time is their utter unreliability," he told the BBC. "These security officials, who themselves are in the dock for the alleged rights violations, would naturally point fingers at whoever the current government in Bangladesh wants to implicate." Tusk said: "The best way forward for Bangladesh is to face the horrific wrongs committed during this period, through a comprehensive process of truth-telling, healing and accountability, and to redress the legacy of serious human rights violations and ensure they can never happen again."