A 91-year-old former chief of an Islamic party in Bangladesh was sentenced to 90 years in jail yesterday for crimes against humanity during the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War, angering both supporters who said the trial was politically motivated and opponents who said he should be executed.
A panel of three judges from Bangladesh’s International Crimes Tribunal (ICT) announced the decision against Ghulam Azam in a packed courtroom in Dhaka. The panel said the former Jamaat-e-Islami Party leader deserved capital punishment, but received a jail sentence instead because of his advanced age and poor health.
Azam was in the dock when the verdict was delivered while protesters outside rallied to demand his execution. Both the defense and the prosecution said they will appeal.
Photo: AFP
Azam led Jamaat-e-Islami in then-east Pakistan in the war when Bangladesh became independent. He is among several Jamaat-e-Islami leaders convicted by the tribunal formed in 2010 by the government of Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina to try those accused of collaborating with Pakistan in the war.
Dhaka says the Pakistani Army killed 3 million people and raped 200,000 women during the nine-month war.
Azam led the party until 2000 and is still considered to be its spiritual leader. Jamaat-e-Islami claims his trial and others were politically motivated, which authorities deny.
Ahead of the verdict, one person was killed in the town of Shibganj, after paramilitary troops fired at Jamaat activists hurling homemade bombs, local police chiefs told reporters.
A low-level official from the ruling Awami League Party was beaten to death by suspected Jamaat supporters in the southwest of the country, the police chiefs also said.
Shops and businesses closed in a day-long strike called by Jamaat-e-Islami, Bangladesh’s main Islamist party and a key part of an opposition coalition, to protest the verdict.
In the capital, several thousand secular protesters gathered to reject the verdict as too lenient.
The tribunal found Azam guilty of 61 charges under five categories: conspiracy, incitement, planning, abetment and failure to prevent killing.
He and his party were accused of forming citizens’ brigades to commit genocide and other serious crimes against pro-independence fighters.
Azam had openly campaigned against the creation of Bangladesh and toured the Middle East to get support for Pakistan. He routinely met with Pakistani authorities during the war. A mouthpiece of his party routinely published statements by Azam and his associates calling for crushing the fighters who fought against Pakistan in 1971.
The prosecution in the trial said Azam must take “command responsibility” for months of atrocities perpetrated by his supporters.
Mahbubul Alam Hanif, a leader of the Awami League Party, said he had expected capital punishment for Azam, but was still happy he had finally been tried.
The verdict created resentment among the family members of those killed in the war.
“Our wait for last 42 years has gone in vain. It’s extremely frustrating,” widow Shyamoli Nasrin Chowdhury said.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion