IANS
DHAKA, NOVEMBER 22
Two Bangladesh opposition leaders were executed in the early hours of Sunday for war crimes committed during the 1971 Independence struggle against Pakistan.
Salahuddin Quader Chowdhury, 67, and Ali Ahsan Mohammad Mujahid, 68, were hanged in Dhaka’s central jail, bdnews24 reported.
Chowdhury, a minister in military dictator H.M. Ershad’s cabinet, was hanged for the genocide of Hindus and the murders of Awami League supporters.
Chowdhury was an influential politician - he was elected MP six times. He was the senior-most leader of the opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party to be sentenced for crimes against humanity.
On October 1, 2013, a special war crimes tribunal held him guilty of nine out of 23 charges including genocide, arson and persecuting people on religious and political grounds, and sentenced him to death. The prosecution said that his father’s residence in Chittagong was turned into a torture cell during the 1971 Liberation War.
Mujahid, a minister in Khaleda ZiaÂ’s coalition cabinet and former commander of Al-Badr, a militia raised by Pakistan to crush the Bengali struggle for independence, planned and executed mass murders, including those of intellectuals, scientists, academics and journalists in 1971.
On July 17, 2013, the tribunal sentenced him to death after he was proven guilty of mass killings and torture of Hindus during the Liberation War.
Both of them appealed against the verdicts, but the Supreme Court upheld their sentences.
On Wednesday, the Supreme Court scrapped their petitions for a review of their death sentences.
Copies of the verdicts were published and sent to the jail on Thursday. The same day, the prison authorities read the verdicts out to the convicted war criminals.
The only hurdle for the executions was a possible presidential clemency, which they had sought on Saturday, but in the end, that plea was turned down.
With SundayÂ’s execution, Bangladesh has hanged a total of four war crimes convicts so far.
Jamaat-e-Islam leader Abdul Quader Molla was the first to walk to the gallows in December 2013 while another leader of the same party, Mohammad Kamaruzzaman, was executed in April this year.
