Abu Taher's military trial deemed illegal
Bangladesh court says hero was murdered
Dhaka: The High Court yesterday set aside a controversial 1976 military court conviction of 1971 Liberation War veteran Colonel Abu Taher that sent him to the gallows, calling the sentence "cold-blooded murder".
"It was no trial at all... It was cold-blooded murder," a two-member High Court bench comprising judges A.H.M. Shamsuddin Chowdhury and Shaikh Mohammad Zakir Hussain said in a verdict after a protracted hearing on four identical writ petitions.
The verdict added: "Abu Taher will be treated as a great patriot."
The judgment accused former president Ziaur Rahman, an army general-turned-politician who founded the now main opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), of executing Abu Taher by design and commented that "he [Rahman] would have faced murder charge had he been alive".
The court also asked the government to constitute a committee with reputed jurists, journalists and others to also investigate Rahman's role in the August 15, 1975, coup in which the country's founder, Shaikh Mujibur Rahman, was assassinated along with most of his family members.
The verdict came on the four writs filed by Abu Taher's family and political comrades in the left leaning Jatiya Samajtantrik Dal (JSD) while the court heard nine leading lawyers or jurists and foreign and local witnesses alongside the state lawyers during the process. They challenged the military law and regulations under which the military tribunal had been formed in 1976. Abu Taher, a liberation war sector commander who subsequently appeared as a left leaning politician on retirement from the army, was the first to be sent to the gallows in independent Bangladesh.
Violation of jail code
The military court tried Abu Taher and handed the death penalty on July 17, 1976. The 1971 veteran, who had lost a leg in the Liberation War, was executed on July 21, only four days after the verdict, in defiance of the jail code that requires a period of at least 21 days for executing death penalties after the judgment.
Bangladesh witnessed a series of coups and counter-coups after August 15, 1975, and after one such putsch Abu Taher sided with Ziaur Rahman and rescued him from captivity. But Rahman is thought to have believed that Abu Taher would eventually be an obstacle to his political ambitions.
