Bangladesh JI leader sentenced to death

Ali Ahsan Mohammad Mujahid, 65 was found guilty of five of seven charges.

DHAKA: A Bangladesh court on Wednesday sentenced a leading Jamaat-e-Islami politician to death for war crimes including murder, torture and kidnapping, as religious hardliners imposed a nationwide strike over the verdict.

Ali Ahsan Mohammad Mujahid, 65, the second-highest ranked official of the country’s largest Islamic party, was found guilty of five of seven charges by the much-criticised International Crimes Tribunal.

Mujahid yelled “it is injustice” as Justice Obaidul Hassan ordered him “hanged by the neck” after the verdict was read out to a packed courtroom in the capital Dhaka.

The judge said that Mujahid, the Secretary General of JI, had been the commander of Al Badr, a notorious militia that carried out “extermination of intellectuals” towards the end of the war.

“As the president of Jamaat’s now defunct student wing, he was the chief of the notorious Al Badr militia between October and December in 1971,” prosecutor Muklesur Rahman Badal said.

Published in The Express Tribune, July 18^th, 2013.