Dhaka: A wealthy tycoon who was a chief financier for Bangladesh’s largest Islamist party could be executed in days after losing his final appeal Tuesday against a death sentence from a controversial war crimes tribunal.
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Earlier on Wednesday, the IG prisons told journalists the Supreme Court verdict rejecting the petition to review his death sentence was read out to him at 7:30am.
Ali’s last hope is to seek a pardon from President Abdul Hamid.
It has been heavily criticized by opposition politicians, including Jamaat-e-Islami leaders.
The decision means there is now no legal bar to executing Ali.
Jamaat-e-Islami and the opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party have criticised the government’s war crimes tribunal as politically motivated.
Hundreds of people cheering the verdict flooded the streets of the capital, Dhaka, and the southeastern port city of Chittagong, where torture camps were set up during the war.
He’s currently an executive committee member of Jamaat and owns several business houses and media outlets, including the now suspended Diganta TV channel.
Human rights groups say the tribunal’s procedures fall short of worldwide standards, but the government rejects that assertion, and the trials are supported by many Bangladeshis.
Last week, a group of United Nations experts urged the Bangladeshi government to annul the death sentence against Mir Quasem Ali and grant him a retrial, noting how the proceedings had reportedly been “marred” by “irregularities”.
Bangladesh says an estimated 3 million people killed, 200,000 women raped and numerous homesteads torched in the then eastern part of Pakistan during the liberation war.
But the party denies its leaders committed any atrocities.
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The special war crimes tribunal set up by Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina in 2010 to prosecute the local agents of the Pakistan army responsible for the war-time atrocities.
