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Bangladesh supreme court upholds death penalty for Islamist party leader

Xinhua, August 30, 2016 Adjust font size:

Bangladesh's highest court on Tuesday rejected appeal from an influential leader of Bangladesh's largest Islamist party who was sentenced to death in 2014 for war crimes including mass killings.

A five-member Appellate Division bench of the Bangladesh Supreme Court, led by Chief Justice Surendra Kumar Sinha, dismissed the review petition of Mir Quasem Ali, Jamaat-e-Islmai party's central executive committee member.

The Appellate Division bench read the verdict at a jam-packed court room in the presence of a huge crowd of people, particularly journalists and lawyers amid tight security.

Security has been beefed up in Dhaka and elsewhere in the country after the verdict against Ali, 64, who is now behind bars.

Attorney General Mahbubey Alam told journalists shortly after the apex court ruling that there was no legal bar to execute condemned killers unless he sought presidential pardon.

As per procedure, sources said death-row war criminal would be asked whether he would seek presidential clemency.

Ali is known as a key financier of Jamaat-e-Islami.

In June 2014 Ali was arrested from the offices of his newspaper Naya Diganta, a leading Bengali daily.

Bangladesh's International Crimes Tribunal (ICT-2) in November 2014 awarded death sentence to him for crimes against humanity.

Ali was indicted in 2012 with 14 charges of crimes against humanity, including looting, mass killings, arson, rape and forcefully converting people into Muslims during the independence war.

After returning to power in January 2009, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, daughter of Bangladesh's independence hero Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, established the first tribunal in March 2010, almost 40 years after the 1971 war.

Four Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami party leaders - Motiur Rahman Nizami, Abdul Quader Molla, Muhammad Kamaruzzaman and Ali Ahsan Mohammad Mujahid - have already been executed for 1971 war crimes.

Apart from them, opposition BNP leader Salaudin Quader Chowdhury was 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