Two Bangladesh opposition leaders were executed in the early hours of Sunday for war crimes committed during the 1971 Independence struggle against Pakistan, the media reported.
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Ali Ahsan Mohammad Mujahid, secretary general of Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami party, and Salauddin Quader Chowdhury, a leader of Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), were hanged in a jail in the capital Dhaka on Saturday.
“The execution took place at 00:45am [Bangladesh time]”, Justice Minister Anisul Huq told AFP after Ali Ahsan Mohammad Mujahid and Salahuddin Quader Chowdhury lost their final bid to escape the gallows.
Sen was rushed to a hospital in Chittagong.
Bangladesh won independence from Pakistan after a nine-month bloody war in 1971.
Jamaat-e-Islami party has called for a strike on Monday.
The executions – and the war crimes tribunal that led to them – also met with criticism from a few foreign governments. A local police chief said officers were checking if the incident was connected to the executions.
Chowdhury, a six-time MP and a former minister, was buried at the family graveyard at his ancestral home in Raujan’s Gahira Village in Chittagong after a funeral prayer.
News of the executions comes as Bangladesh has been reeling under a string of terror attacks, beginning with the killing of four secular bloggers and a publisher this year by a Islamic fundamentalist group inspired by the writings of al-Qaeda.
The convictions triggered Bangladesh’s deadliest violence since independence, with a few 500 people killed, mainly in clashes between Jamaat-e-Islami activists and police.
On Friday, one day before the executions were carried out, USA lawmakers had described the war crimes tribunal as “flawed”, suggesting it had been exploited for political ends, with the U.S. State Department urging Dhaka to postpone the executions. Leaders of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, in a letter sent Tuesday to the top US diplomat for South Asia, voiced concern that “democratic space is shrinking” in Bangladesh amid “a growing climate of violence, fear and self-censorship”.
Bangladesh’s government has reiterated that the war crimes trials are necessary to bring murderers to justice. Although the immediate test will be to rein in protests, neutralising the growing force of the radicals will be a far more daunting task as even a few prominent leaders in the Awami League, Hasina’s party, are averse to pursuing the agenda of a secular Bangladesh.
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Mujahid was sentenced to death in 2013.
