“Pakistan is deeply saddened over the execution of the prominent leader of Jamat-e-Islami, Bangladesh, Mir Quasem Ali, for the alleged crimes committed before December 1971, through a flawed judicial process”, a Pakistan Foreign Office statement said.
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Quasem, who led wartime militia al-Badr force in Chittagong to commit crimes against humanity in 1971, is now kept at a condemned cell in Kashimpur high-security prison. Ali was conveyed the verdict on Wednesday, a day after the Supreme Court upheld an earlier ruling that had handed down a death sentence, following which he had sought time to decide over seeking the clemency.
Relatives of Mir Quashem Ali, senior leader of the country’s largest Islamic party Jamaat-e-Islami, arrive to meet Ali at the Kashimpur Central Jail in Gazipur, on the outskirts of Dhaka, Bangladesh, Saturday, Sept. 3, 2016.
Hundreds of paramilitary border guards were also deployed outside the prison and in the capital Dhaka, a director of the Border Guard Bangladesh told AFP.
It said Ali had been “hanged unjustifiably as part of the government’s conspiracy to make Jamaat-e-Islami a leaderless party”.
Yesterday, Ali declined to seek presidential mercy as the last resort to save his neck after the Supreme Court rejected his final review petition earlier this week. The last execution was that of Jamaat chief Motiur Rahman Nizami over war crimes on May 10 this year.
Ali was a key financier of the Jamaat-e-Islami party.
He was convicted in November 2014 of a series of war crimes including the abduction and murder of a young independence fighter.
“There is no question that the people of Bangladesh deserve justice for crimes committed during the War of Independence, but the death penalty is a human rights violation and will not achieve this”.
But Hasina’s government has defended the trials, saying they are needed to heal the wounds of the conflict, which it says left three million people dead.
Rights groups have also said the trials are flawed and lack any foreign oversight, while United Nations human rights experts last week urged Bangladesh to retry Ali in compliance with global standards.
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