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Bangladesh Islamist party calls strike over death sentence for chief

Xinhua, January 7, 2016 Adjust font size:

Bangladesh's largest Islamist party has called countrywide strike for Thursday in protest of the apex court verdict that upheld the death penalty for its chief over war crimes 44 years ago.

Hours after Bangladesh's Supreme Court on Wednesday upheld the death penalty for Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islmai party's Ameer (President) Motiur Rahman Nizami, the party called the countrywide dawn-to-dusk strike from 6:00 a.m. local time Thursday in a statement.

Jamaat claimed that the government filed ill motivated baseless cases against its top leaders in order to make the party leaderless, the statement said.

Seventy-three year old Nizami served as the agriculture and industries minister in Khaleda Zia's 2001-2006 cabinet.

On Oct. 29 last year, the International Crimes Tribunal (ICT-1) handed down capital punishment to the 72-year-old Jamaat chief for war crimes which include the killings of intellectuals.

Defense lawyer Khandaker Mahbub Hossain told journalists shortly after the announcement of the verdict on Wednesday that they will file a review petition with the SC.

Nizami was indicted in 2012 with 16 charges of crimes against humanity, including looting, mass killings, arson, rape and forcefully converting people into Muslims during the war.

The indictment order, in a brief profile of the accused, said Nizami was a key organizer of the Al-Badr, an auxiliary force of then Pakistani army which planned and executed the killing of Bangalee intellectuals at the end of the 1971 war.

Nizami is among the top Jamaat leaders who have been tried in war crimes tribunals Prime Minister Sheikh Hasian's Bangladesh Awami League-led government formed in 2010 to bring the perpetrators of 1971 to book.

Three Jamaat leaders -- Abdul Quader Molla, Muhammad Kamaruzzaman and Ali Ahsan Mohammad Mujahid, have been executed.

Both Kamaruzzaman and Molla refused to seek presidential clemency.

Apart from them, Jamaat Secretary General Ali Ahsan Mohammad Mujahid and opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party(BNP) leader Salaudin Quader Chowdhury were executed on Nov. 22 last year.

Both BNP and Jamaat have dismissed the court as a government "show trial," saying it is a domestic set-up without the oversight or involvement of the United Nations.

Muslim-majority Bangladesh was called East Pakistan until 1971. The government of Hasina said about 3 million people were killed in the war although independent researchers think that between 300,000 and 500,000 died. Endit