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Roundup: Bangladesh executes top militant ringleader, 2 accomplices over 2004 attack on British diplomat

Xinhua, April 13, 2017 Adjust font size:

Bangladesh on Wednesday executed three militants, including a ringleader, for the 2004 grenade attack on then British high commissioner to the country.

The ringleader was also a key suspect in the plotting to assassinate current Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina and blow up courts, secular institutions as well as shrines and churches.

The local banned militant outfit Harkat-ul-Jehad-al-Islami (HUJI) ringleader Mufti Abdul Hannan and his close aide Sharif Shahedul Alam were hanged at Kashimpur High Security Prison in Gazipur on the outskirts of capital Dhaka at around 10:00 p.m. local time Wednesday, Inspector General of Prisons Brigadier General Syed Iftekhar Uddin told journalists.

He said the third HUJI militant Delwar Hossain was executed at the same time at a jail in the country's northeastern Sylhet city, some 241 km northeast of capital Dhaka.

The militants were hanged after Bangladeshi president turned down their clemency pleas.

A three-member Appellate Division bench of the Bangladesh Supreme Court, led by Chief Justice Surendra Kumar Sinha, last month dismissed the final review petition of the militants.

The convicts had conducted the grenade attack on then British High Commissioner to Bangladesh Anwar Choudhury on May 21, 2004 at a shrine of Muslim saint in the country's northeastern city of Sylhet where the Bangladesh-born British diplomat came to offer prayer.

Three people were killed and over 100, including Anwar Choudhury, were injured in the deadly attack. Mufti Hannan reportedly confessed to having supplied grenades for launching the attack, in a statement before a court in Dhaka in 2006.

Apart from this, he has been sentenced to death in a number of other cases.

He came in the limelight of Bangladesh's politics after he announced at a public rally of Islamists in 1999 to establish a Taliban like government in Bangladesh by 2000.

Hannan who was arrested in August 2005 confessed to an interrogating police about his bomb planting for assassination of the then opposition leader and now Prime Minister of Bangladesh Sheikh Hasina in 2000. The bomb was recovered by police before Hasina addressed a rally.

Hannan, who wanted to establish Islam Sharia law in place of the British-origin common law, confessed that he was the mastermind in the countrywide bombings on Aug. 17, 2005.

Hannan had directly participated in the war in Afghanistan against the former Soviet Union. During the war he got a bullet injury in his hand and then returned to Bangladesh in 1995 and formed his militant group Harkatul Jihad, which was banned by the government. Endit