Bangladesh on Sunday strongly protested the statement issued by Pakistan following the execution of Mir Quasem Ali, terming Islamabad’s remarks an interference in its internal affairs.
Bangladesh’s Foreign Ministry summoned Pakistan’s acting High Commissioner Samina Mehtab in Dhaka to lodge the protest. “We called their acting High Commissioner Samina Mehtab as we consider Islamabad’s statement as direct interference to Bangladesh’s internal affairs,” said a Foreign Ministry spokesman.
Shortly after the execution of Ali, a business tycoon and Jamaat-e-Islami’s main financier, on Saturday, Islamabad had issued a statement that questioned the fairness and transparency of war crimes trials in Bangladesh.
It had termed the hanging “an act of suppressing the opposition, through flawed trials”.
It had also offered “deepest condolences to the bereaved family members” of Ali.
The chief of the Al-Badr militia in Chittagong during the country’s Liberation War in 1971, Ali (64) was executed at Kashimpur Central Jail, outside Dhaka, at around 10:30 am on Saturday. He was the fifth Jamaat leader and sixth individual overall to be executed for war crimes.
Mir Quasem Ali buried
Bangladesh, in its previous protest against similar statements, had said Pakistan was once again acknowledging its “direct involvement and complicity” in the crimes committed during the Liberation War.
Ali, the son of a railway employee, became the Jamaat-e-Islami’s financial backbone and a key member in the party’s top brass in the post-1975 period of Bangladesh’s history.
Following the execution, he was buried at his ancestral village Harirampur, in Manikganj, early on Sunday.
