When Habibur Rahman last month joined scores gunned down by Bangladesh’s elite paramilitary anti-crime taskforce, officers told a vivid tale of how he had met his end.

The alleged drug dealer had been killed in a gunfight with officers, they said, after he and his associates were cornered in their hideout and fired on police first.

Such shootouts with the police Rapid Action Battalion are daily occurrences after the government launched a deadly crackdown on the drugs trade which has drawn comparisons with President Roderigo Duterte’s similarly violent purge in the Philippines.

More than 120 people have been killed in just over a fortnight and thousands arrested in what the country says is a campaign to stem the trade of addictive stimulant pills known as yaba flowing to Bangladesh’s addicts.

But as the death toll soars there are growing allegations the campaign is a cover for a wave of extrajudicial killings and political intimidation ahead of a general election later this year.