Bangladesh | Fifth Islamist party leader executed for 1971 war

Relatives of Mir Quasem Ali, senior leader of the country’s largest Islamic party Jamaat-e-Islami, arrive to meet Ali at the Kashimpur Central Jail in Gazipur, on the outskirts of Dhaka

Bangladeshi authorities executed a top Islamist party leader convicted of war crimes involving the nation’s 1971 independence war against Pakistan, officials said.
Mir Quasem Ali, a leader of the Jamaat-e-Islami party, was hanged at 10:30 p.m. Saturday, hours after several dozen family members and relatives met him for the last time inside Kashimpur Central Jail near the capital, Dhaka, said Proshanto Kumar Bonik, a senior jail superintendent.
“We are doing our necessary formalities now. We will send the body soon to the ancestral home in Manikganj district for burial,” Bonik said.
Immediately after the execution, Home Minister Asaduzzaman Khan said security measures were put in place to prevent unrest by Ali’s supporters, including deployment of paramilitary border guards and additional police in Dhaka and other cities.
The Jamaat-e-Islami party in a statement protested Ali’s execution and called for an eight-hour general strike beginning this morning.
The execution took place a day after Ali refused to seek presidential clemency. The president had previously rejected appeals for clemency by other Islamist party leaders facing execution.
Last week, the Supreme Court rejected a final appeal for reviewing Ali’s death sentence handed out by a special tribunal two years ago. After the ruling, the Jamaat-e-Islami party called for a daylong general strike across the country last Wednesday, but got little response.
A special tribunal dealing with war crimes sentenced Ali to death in November 2014. The 63-year-old member of Jamaat-e-Islami’s highest policy-making body was found guilty on eight charges, two of which carried the death sentence, including the abduction and murder of a young man in a torture chamber. Ali was sentenced to 72 years in prison on the other charges.
Ali became the fifth Jamaat-e-Islami party leader to be executed since 2010, when Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina formed the special tribunal to try suspected war criminals.
The international human rights group Amnesty International noted that the United Nations had raised questions about the fairness of the trials of Ali and other Islamist party leaders.
“There is no question that the people of Bangladesh deserve justice for crimes committed during the War of Independence, but the death penalty is a human rights violation and will not achieve this. It is a cruel and irreversible punishment that most of the world’s countries have now rid themselves of,” said Champa Patel, Amnesty International’s South Asia Director, in a statement released Saturday. MDT/AP