Mujahid was a senior leader of Bangladesh’s largest Islamic party and Chowdhury had been elected to parliament six times.
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In a statement, the JI chief said that Ali Ahsan Mojaheed was executed for his loyalty with ideology of Pakistan. A few hours after the execution, a security detail escorted ambulances carrying the men’s bodies to their ancestral homes where their families were to perform burial rituals.
Jamaat-e-Islami Ameer Sirajul Haq has condemned the execution of JI Bangladesh Secretary General Ali Hasan Mujahid by government of Bangladesh for his support to Pakistan in 1971.
The note said that Pakistan has once again acknowledge its direct involvement and complicity with the atrocity committed during Bangladesh’s independence war by openly taking the side of those convicted of crimes against humanity.
Besides Chowdhury and Mujahid, two other 1971 war crime convicts Abdul Quader Mollah and Mohammad Kamaruzzaman had been executed so far.
Jamaat, whose two other senior leaders already have been executed on war crimes charges, issued a statement calling for a nationwide general strike today.
Bangladesh is on high alert and paramilitary border guards, RAB and police have beefed up the security.
“I’ve waited for this day for a long 44 years”, said Shawan Mahmud, daughter of top musician Altaf Mahmud, who was killed by militia that Mujahid was convicted of leading during the war.
Mujahid used to claim there were no war criminals in Bangladesh. “But this trial bought out the enormity of the killings in 1971 and especially its communal nature”, said Khushi Kabir, a Bangladeshi human rights activist.
This week, five members of the U.S. House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee said in a letter to the State Department’s top South Asia official that the tribunal’s process was “deeply flawed” and said that members of the House panel were concerned by reports that “democratic space is shrinking” in Bangladesh.
Chairman Imran Khan has written a letter to Bangladesh’s Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina asking her to describe the objective of “war crimes tribunals”, a private TV channel reported on Monday. The Bangladesh government says that Pakistani soldiers, aided by local collaborators, killed 3 million people and raped 200,000 women during the war. They have unfolded against a background of rising extremist violence, with deadly attacks on secular intellectuals and religious minority groups becoming more frequent over the past year. Meanwhile, at least a dozen Christian bishops or priests have received death threats by phone or SMS from suspected radical groups, according to a Christian association.
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“The people of Pakistan and Bangladesh wish to cultivate amicability and brotherhood by putting behind bitterness of the past”, he said.
