Bangladesh executes two war criminals

President Abdul Hamid rejected their mercy petitions on November 20, hours after they had sought presidential clemency in a last-ditch attempt to escape the gallows. They were executed by hanging at 12:55am Sunday at Dhaka Central Jail, said Inspector General of Prison Syed Iftekhar Uddin.

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.

On Wednesday, Bangladesh’s Supreme Court upheld the death sentences for both men, former members of parliament who had been convicted in 2013 on charges including genocide and torture during the war.

In response, the Jamaat has called for a shutdown in Dhaka on Monday.

This was the third occasion when Bangladesh summoned Pakistani envoy after it initiated a belted process in 2010 to expose to justice the 1971 war criminals. As a precautionary measure, however, the administration has flooded Dhaka city with armed police and shut down messaging services such as WhatsApp and the social media website, Facebook.

The convictions triggered Bangladesh’s deadliest violence since independence, with some 500 people killed, mainly in clashes between Jamaat-e-Islami activists and police.

Violent protests have followed previous convictions and executions from the war-crimes trials, and authorities deployed heavy security and asked businesses adjacent to the Dhaka Central jail to close their doors.

The opposition said the tribunals were created to settle scores rather than deliver justice but the government insisted that the trials have been fair and were needed to address the country’s bloody history.

Bangladesh was the eastern part of Pakistan until the 1971 war of independence. The two sided with the Pakistan forces and “committed atrocities against pro-liberation people and the Hindus”. Bangladesh commemorates December 14 as the Day of the Martyred Intellectuals.

“As emphasised earlier, we have also been noting the reaction of the global community on the flawed trials in Bangladesh related to the events of 1971”, it added.

Although Jamaat was initially banned in the newly emerged independent and secular country, it was soon rehabilitated as Jamaat-e-Islami Bangladesh under a changed political scenario that followed the assassination of Father of the Nation Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman.

Human Rights Watch and other organizations have said that the tribunal’s work does not conform to global standards and that its decisions have been arbitrary and politically motivated.