Bangladesh upholds tycoon’s death sentence

Bangladesh’s Supreme Court rejected on Tuesday a final appeal by a top Jamaat-e-Islami leader convicted of war crimes in the country’s independence war against Pakistan, confirming a death sentence given earlier by a special tribunal.

In March, the Supreme Court upheld the death penalty for Mir Quasem Ali, 63, a media tycoon and key financier of the Jamaat-e-Islami party, for murder, confinement, torture and incitement to religious hatred during the war to leave Pakistan.

A five-member appeal bench led by the chief justice, Surendra Kumar Sinha, conducted the hearing, and finally handed down the verdict in the case Tuesday.

A court of the International Crimes Tribunal, Bangladesh (ICT, B) sentenced Mir Quasem Ali to death on 2 November 2014.

Attorney General Mahbubey Alam said that Quasem’s death-sentence will be carried out after the Supreme Court releases full text of the verdict, reports the Daily Star.

Four of the party’s leaders have already been executed since 2013, former chief Motiur Rahman Nizami among them.

Ali’s party is outlawed from running in Bangladesh’s election process and it reacted to the rejection of his appeal as “political vengeance” for charges they say are “false” and “baseless”.

Rights groups say the procedures of the tribunal fall short of global standards but the government has also rejected that claim.

During the Liberation War, he set up a torture camp at Mahamaya Dalim Hotel in Chittagong, masterminded brutal torture of detainees and killed many of them.

It can not be said for sure how many days it would take for the authorities to complete the procedures for executing the verdict.

In a statement, the party rejected Tuesday’s verdict and called for a daylong general strike across the country Wednesday.

Prime Minister Sheikh 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. The government denies the accusations.

The war crime tribunal was established in 2010 to prosecute criminals who assisted the Pakistani army to suppress the struggle for independence in Bangladesh.