Dhaka: Bangladesh overnight hanged two influential opposition leaders for crimes they had committed during its 1971 Liberation War while authorities enforced a nationwide security vigil fearing the execution could spark backlash.
Officials familiar with the execution process said BNP’s Salauddin Quader Chowdhury, the top aide of ex-premier Khaleda Zia, and fundamentalist Jamaat-e-Islam’s secretary general Ali Ahsan Mohammad Mujahid were hanged after midnight on Saturday at the high security Dhaka Central Jail.
“Hangmen escorted them to the gallows after midnight while they were hanged at around 12.45am (BST) … the doctor declared them dead 20 minutes later,” a jail official who witnessed the execution process told Gulf News.
The two convicts of “crimes against humanity” came hours after President Abdul Hamid rejected their mercy petitions which they filed three days after the Supreme Court in its final judgement upheld their death penalties on charges of genocide during the 1971 Liberation War against Pakistan.
Officials said the death row convicts preferred to seek presidential mercy admitting their guilt in writing at midday while their petitions were submitted to Bangabhaban presidential palace in the evening on completion of procedural formalities.
But President Hamid declined to exercise his constitutional prerogative for granting clemency, though family members later claimed they did not seek the presidential pardon.
Bangladesh in 2010 initiated the belated process to bring to justice top Pakistani collaborators who acted as perpetrators of 1971 atrocities. It constituted high-powered special tribunals and an investing agency.
Until yesterday, only two senior leaders of Jamaat (which was opposed to Bangladesh independence in 1971) have been hanged — one in 2013 and the second in 2015, while the appeal hearing against death penalties of several others, including Jamaat chief Motiur Rahman Nizami were pending before the apex court.
But only Chowdhury and Mujahid were the first to seek presidential clemency admitting their guilt though the duo previously attracted extra media focus by ridiculing the Liberation War and war veterans, while defending their stance in 1971, which had visibly intensified public demand for the war crimes trial.
Both were ministers in the past BNP-led four-party coalition government with Jamaat being its key-partner.
Chowdhury, 66, was a BNP MP and the most senior leader from the party to be sentenced for crimes against humanity with the tribunal finding him guilty of nine out of 23 charges, including genocide, arson and persecuting people on religious and political grounds.
He was the eldest son of the late Muslim League and Chittagong-based leader Fazlul Qadir Chowdhury who was the speaker of the National Assembly of undivided Pakistan in 1965.
The prosecution said his father’s residence in Chittagong was turned into a torture cell during the war. Chowdhury denied all charges with the BNP — which did not exist at the time of the war — described his trial as political vendetta.
Mujahid, 67, the second man in Jamaat, was found to be the leader of infamous elite Al-Badr auxiliary force of Pakistani troops in 1971 when he also served as the general secretary and subsequently the president of Jamaat’s student wing Islami Chhatra Sangha.
The court found him to be a key-planner in the systematic massacre of top Bengali intelligentsia including university teachers just ahead of Bangladesh’s December 16, 1971 victory.
Like most of the senior Jamaat leaders he went into hiding soon after independence, but resurfaced after the August 15, 1975 coup which killed Bangladesh’s founder and incumbent Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s father Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman along with most of his family members and toppled the post independence government.
BNP earlier made no comment about Chowdhury being tried, but after the Supreme Court earlier this week rejected his petition seeking to review the death penalty, a party spokesman said: “He has fallen victim to persecution because of his political identity, and he has been denied justice”.
But Jamaat spearheaded an anti-trial campaign calling it a government plot to destroy the party while its acting chief Moqbul Ahmad in a statement yesterday said that Mujahid was a victim of “government conspiracy” and called a day long general strike on Monday across the country.
No violence was reported from any parts of the country as the bodies of Chowdhury and Mujahid were taken to their ancestral homes at southeastern Chittagong and southwestern Faridpur by police where they were buried in family graveyards.
Authorities earlier called out paramilitary Border Guard Bangladesh (BGB) to help police and elite anti-crime Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) as a precautionary measure against possible trouble over the execution in the capital and other major cities.
Home minister Asaduzzaman Khan Kamal, however, earlier told newsmen that “no reason is there to be concerned with the law and order situation as law enforcement and intelligence agencies remain alert”.
Muslim-majority Bangladesh has seen a rise in Islamist violence in recent months, with two foreigners and four secular writers and a publisher and two policemen killed this year by suspected Islamists.