Bangladesh party chief gets death sentence

A special tribunal has sentenced the leader of Bangladesh’s largest Islamist party to death for atrocities and multiple killings during the nation’s independence war against Pakistan in 1971.

Former independence activists outside the Dhaka court after the verdict. Picture: AFP

Motiur Rahman Nizami, 71, sat calmly in the dock as the head of a three-judge panel, M Enayetur Rahim, yesterday read the verdict in the packed courtroom in Dhaka, the capital. The defence said it would appeal.

Outside, police and paramilitary units patrolled the streets because previous verdicts by the tribunal have sparked violence.

Nizami’s Jamaat-e-Islami party denounced the verdict in a statement and called a general strike for today, Sunday and Monday. Friday and Saturday make up the weekend in Bangladesh.

Nizami, a former cabinet minister, was tried on 16 charges, including genocide, murder, torture, rape and destruction of property. He was accused of personally carrying out or ordering the deaths of nearly 600 Bangladeshis.

Bangladesh says Pakistani soldiers, aided by local collaborators, killed three million people, raped 200,000 women and forced about ten million people to take shelter in refugee camps across the border in neighbouring India during the nine-month war.

The prosecution said Nizami acted as the supreme commander of the Al-Badr militia, which carried out a systematic plan to torture and execute pro-liberation supporters during the war, including teachers, engineers and journalists.

The group is blamed for killing dozens of people by kidnapping them from their homes just before Pakistan surrendered to a joint force of India and Bangladesh on 16 December 1971. At that time, Nizami was also the president of Islami Chhatra Sangha, the student wing of Jamaat-e-Islami, in what was previously called East Pakistan.

Asif Munier, the son of a university teacher and a prominent writer who was killed in 1971, said he and his family had been waiting for this for 43 years.

“I want the verdict to be implemented soon,” Munier said.

The Jamaat-e-Islami party openly campaigned against independence and its then-leader, Ghulam Azam, toured the Middle East to mobilise support for Pakistan, but the party has denied committing atrocities. Azam was sentenced last year for similar crimes and died naturally in a hospital prison cell on 23 October.

Two special tribunals set up by prime minister Sheikh Hasina to try people for war crimes have delivered ten verdicts. One senior leader of Jamaat-e-Islami party has already been hanged for his role in killing people in 1971.

Nizami was a cabinet minister during former prime minister Khaleda Zia’s last term in 2001-6.