Clashes as Bangladesh court upholds death for Islamist leader

The decision to reject Mohammed Kamaruzzaman’s appeal triggered sporadic violence across Bangladesh.

DHAKA // Violence broke out in Bangladesh on Monday after the supreme court upheld the death sentence of an Islamist party leader convicted of committing war crimes during the 1971 independence conflict.

The court’s rejection of Mohammed Kamaruzzaman’s appeal means that he will now be hanged within months, unless the case is reviewed again or he is granted clemency by the country’s president.

Kamaruzzaman, 62, the assistant secretary general of Jamaat-e-Islami, will be the second Islamist leader to hang for crimes committed during the war which saw the former East Pakistan secede from Islamabad.

The decision triggered sporadic violence across Bangladesh.

Islamist protesters set off more than a dozen crude improvised bombs, torched and damaged cars and pelted police with rocks, who responded by firing rubber bullets and tear gas.

Jamaat-e-Islami called a nationwide 48-hour strike from Wednesday to protest against the decision.

The ruling came after another senior Jamaat-e-Islami official, Abdul Quader Molla, was executed in December after being convicted on similar charges.

In the past week, Bangladesh’s International Crimes Tribunal, a domestic court, has sentenced Jamaat-e-Islami’s supreme leader Motiur Rahman Nizami and top financier Mir Quasem Ali to death.

The convictions of some of Nizami’s top lieutenants last year triggered the country’s deadliest political violence since independence. Tens of thousands of Jamaat-e-Islami supporters fought police in protests that left some 500 people dead.

* Agence France-Presse