The International Crimes Tribunal on October 29, 2014, sentenced the Jamaat chief to death as the 75-year-old convict was found guilty in eight out of 16 counts of charges including genocide, rape, arson and other crimes against humanity during the nine-month war. Zia is Hasina’s arch rival, and Nizami was a cabinet minister during her last term in 2001-2006.
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Bangladeshi Supreme Court has dismissed appeal by head of Jamaat-e-Islami party, Motiur Rahman Nizami.
Jamaat’s secretary general Ali Ahsan Mohammad Mujaheed, who was also Nizami’s top aide in 1971, was executed past year along with Salauddin Quader Chowdhury, a stalwart of the key opposition BNP which is a crucial ally of the fundamentalist party.
Following the verdict, Jamaat announced a general strike for Thursday, calling the charges against Nizami “false, baseless and imaginary”.
“The court upheld the death sentence in three out of four charges”. Bangladesh claims that Pakistani soldiers, aided by locals, killed 3 million people during the war, raped 200,000 women and displaced about 10 million people, who took shelter in Indian refugee camps, AP reported.
Will death sentence beget more death? At the time, Jamaat-e-Islami had openly campaigned against independence.
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. Defence lawyer Khandker Mahbub Hossain told reporters that they would decide their next course of action after consulting with him.
“We’ve stepped up security”.
“He was responsible for killing and instigating atrocities during 1971 war”, he said.
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Several rights groups have denounced the trials over war crimes by saying that they fell short of worldwide standards and that they lack global oversight. The secular government maintains the trials are needed to heal the wounds of the conflict, which it says left three million people dead.
