14 October 2015•Update: 14 October 2015
By Mainul Islam Khan
DHAKA, Bangladesh
Ali Ahsan Mohammad Mujahid, secretary-general of the Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami group, has asked the country’s supreme court to review a death penalty handed down against him earlier, which was upheld by the court on Wednesday.
Along with Mujahid, Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) leader Salahuddin Quader Chowdhury, who has also been slapped with a death sentence, also has only one day left to file a petition against the sentence before the court.
The supreme court’s appellate division upheld the sentences against both men on June 16 and July 29 respectively.
Both of them had 15 days to file their petitions beginning from the day that the court delivered the sentences.
The International Crimes Tribunal, a special domestic court, had found Mujahid guilty of five out of the seven charges leveled against him and sentenced him to death in July of 2013.
Two top Jamaat-e-Islami leaders, Abdul Qader Molla and Mohammad Kamaruzzaman, were also convicted -- and subsequently hanged -- in 2013 and in April of this year respectively.
The two had served in various government posts in Bangladesh at different times.
Mujahid had served with the BNP’s coalition and Chowdhury was the parliamentary affairs advisor for Khaleda Zia when she was in power from 2001 to 2006.
Chowdhury hails from a political family in the port city of Chittagng. His father, Fazlul Quader Chowdhury, had opposed Bangladesh’s independence from Pakistan when he had served as speaker of Pakistan’s parliament.
The International Crimes Tribunal was established in 2009 to investigate war crimes committed in 1971.
Bangladeshi opposition parties and international organizations such as Human Rights Watch have criticized the recent death sentences and expressed concerns about the accused not getting a fair trial.
Bangladesh accuses the Pakistani army along with local collaborators of killing up to three million people during its 1971 war for independence.
