Dhaka court clears way for Islamist’s execution

People take part in a torch rally as they celebrate the Supreme Court’s verdict on Abdul Quader Molla in Dhaka.

AFP/Dhaka

Bangladesh’s top court yesterday cleared the way for the execution of a senior Islamist leader charged with war crimes, just two days after he was given a dramatic last-minute reprieve from hanging.

Chief Justice Muzammel Hossain “dismissed” Abdul Quader Molla’s appeal for a final review of his death sentence, removing his last legal option against execution, which could now be carried out as early as midnight.

“There is now no legal bar to execute him,” Attorney General Mahbubey Alam told AFP in the Supreme Court in Dhaka.

Molla had been set on Tuesday night to become the first person put to death for massacres committed during Bangladesh’s 1971 independence war, following a series of verdicts by a special war crimes court that have sparked deadly protests.

But a judge stayed the hanging of Molla, a leader of the Jamaat-e-Islami party, just 90 minutes before his scheduled execution at a jail in Dhaka, amid international concern over the fairness of the war crime trials of mainly opposition leaders.

Molla, 65, was found to have been a leader of a pro-Pakistan militia which fought against the country’s independence and killed some of Bangladesh’s top professors, doctors, writers and journalists.

A key opposition official, he was convicted of rape, murder and mass murder, including the killing of more than 350 unarmed civilians.

Since Wednesday, the Supreme Court has heard an appeal on whether Molla’s death sentence deserved a review, with his lawyers arguing it was “a constitutional right”.

However Attorney General Alam told the court that there was “no scope for a review in war-crimes cases”.

Hundreds of secular protesters erupted in celebration hearing the latest verdict. They have been camping at Shahbagh square in the capital since Tuesday night, shouting slogans including: “Hang Quader Molla, hang war criminals”.

National prisons chief Main Uddin Khandaker told AFP that he has received a copy of the Supreme Court’s decision.

“We’re completely prepared to hang him,” he added, without confirming when the execution would be carried out.

Molla is one of five Islamists and other politicians sentenced to death by the International Crimes Tribunal, which the opposition says are politically motivated and aimed at eradicating its leaders.

The sentences have triggered riots and plunged the country into its worst violence since independence. Some 231 people have been killed in street protests between secular and Islamist activists and with police, since January when the verdicts were first handed down.

Four opposition supporters were the latest killed yesterday, all shot dead following clashes in the southern town of Laxmipur, police and doctors said.

Molla’s lawyers had protested the original order, saying the death penalty was awarded based on evidence given by only one prosecution witness, who had also earlier given two different versions of the same event.

“We’re unhappy. He did not get justice,” defence lawyer Khandaker Mahbub Hossain said. 

New York-based Human Rights Watch and two UN Special Rapporteurs have warned that by executing Molla without the death sentence being reviewed, the country could be breaking international law.

UN Human Rights chief Navi Pillay also wrote to Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina seeking a stay of the execution, saying the trial did not meet stringent international standards for the death penalty.

But deputy law minister Quamrul Islam rejected the criticism, saying “did they stop the execution of Saddam Hussein?”

“What logic do they have to stop the (Molla’s) execution?” Islam told AFP.

Hasina’s government says threemn people died in the war, many at the hands of pro-Pakistan militias led by Jamaat leaders who opposed secession from Pakistan on religious grounds.

Independent researchers put the death toll between 300,000 and 500,000 people.

Bangladesh regularly carries out the death sentence by hanging. But Molla’s death would be the most high-profile execution since January 2010, when five ex-army officers were put to death over the assassination of the nation’s founding leader Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, Hasina’s father.