Dhaka: Bangladesh authorities on Wednesday served a death warrant to a top 1971 war crimes convict, fundamentalist Jamaat-e-Islami chief Motiur Rahman Nizami, two months after the apex court upheld his death penalty.
“We received the death penalty earlier this morning and served it to the convict [on death row],” an official of the suburban high security Kashimpur Jail said.
Attorney general Mahbubey Alam, meanwhile, said the leader of the country’s biggest Islamist party would now have 15 days to seek a review of the judgement by the Supreme Court in his final bid to evade the gallows.
“If he prefers not to get the judgement reviewed within the time frame, or if his petition is rejected, the government may execute the verdict anytime in the subsequent days,” Alam said.
However, he said, Nizami can seek presidential mercy immediately if the review petition is rejected, but he would not get any extra time to decide whether he’d seek clemency.
Bangladesh’s International Crimes Tribunal (ICT-BD) originally sentenced Nizami to death in October 29, 2014, and after an appeal hearing, the apex court found the punishment appropriate for him — the judgement was made on January 6 this year.
According to TV reports, Nizami’s lawyers sought to meet their client in jail when the death warrant was issued, apparently to discuss the next step.
The development came as the ICT-BD issued the warrant, wrapped in red clothes, after receiving the Supreme Court’s full judgement in writing late yesterday.
Officials familiar with the process said the three members of the special tribunal last night signed the warrant hours after the Supreme Court’s judgement reached them.
They said the warrant was immediately sent to the prison authority in Dhaka, which forwarded the document to Kashimpur jail early this morning.
In four previous cases of execution — four 1971 war crimes convicts in the past two years — magistrates approached the prisoners on death row and asked them if they wanted to file mercy petitions.
Two of them remained silent, while the other two filed mercy petitions, which President Abdul Hamid immediately rejected allowing jail authorities to execute them in subsequent hours.
Nizami appears to be the last remaining top perpetrator of crimes against humanity whose fate now hangs in the balance.
“It would be a failure of justice, unless he is handed down the death penalty,” the tribunal said as it handed to Nizami a sentence of capital punishment in October 2014, convicting him of “superior responsibility” as the chief of infamous Al Badr militia forces in 1971.
The so-called elite militia force is castigated for a systematic campaign to massacre a large number of top intelligentsia.
Nizami was found guilty of systematic killings of more than 450 people in his village in northwester Pabna and siding with the Pakistani troops during the Liberation War.
Nizami at that time was also the chief of the student front of the organisation Jamaat, which was opposed to Bangladesh’s 1971 independence.
Jamaat’s secretary-general, Ali Ahsan Mohammad Mujahid, who was also Nizami’s top aide in 1971, was executed on November 22 last year along with Salauddin Quader Chowdhury, a stalwart of the key-opposition outside parliament Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), which is a crucial ally of the fundamentalist party.
They were hanged after President Abdul Hamid rejected their mercy petitions.
Bangladesh has so far executed four war crimes convicts since the process to expose to trial the top Bengali perpetrators of 1971 atrocities began, in line with the electoral commitment of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina in 2008.
Two others — former Jamaat chief Ghulam Azam and ex-BNP minister Abdul Alim — earlier were handed down an “imprisonment until death” penalty instead of capital punishment on the grounds of their old age — they were more than 80 years old.
They subsequently died in the prison cells of a specialised state-run hospital due to old-age ailments.
