Bangladesh on Tuesday night executed Jamaat-e-Islami leader Motiur Rahman Nizami. He had been convicted by the country’s War Crimes Tribunal for crimes against humanity committed during the nation’s Liberation War of 1971.
The execution took place slightly after 12 midnight at the Dhaka Central Jail.
Hours before the hanging, Home Minister Assaduzzaman Khan Kamal told reporters that Nizami had sought not to file a mercy petition to the President and that the executive order to carry out the death sentence has been sent to the prison authorities.
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Bangladesh’s Supreme Court on May 5 had dismissed Nizami’s petition for reviewing its verdict upholding the death penalty given by the International Crimes Tribunal-1 in 2014.
Nizami (73) became the fourth Jamaat leader and the fifth person hanged after being convicted of war crimes by one of the two International Crimes Tribunals.
Twenty four members of the Jamaat leader’s family, including his wife and children, went to the prison in the evening to meet him for one last time.
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Security was strengthened in and around the Dhaka Central Jail and the street in front of the prison was barricaded.
Members of elite force Rapid Action Battalion and Border Guard Bangladesh (BGB) were deployed. Al-Badr chief in 1971 Nizami was the president of Jamaat’s student wing Islami Chhatra Sangha from 1966 to 1971 and the chief of infamous al-Badr brigade which was responsible for killing scores of the country’s top secular intellectuals.
A former Minister in ex-Prime Minister Khaleda Zia’s Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP)-led coalition government, Nizami had been in jail since 2010. He was given capital punishment in October 2014 by the War Crimes Tribunal after being convicted on charges related to murder, torture and rape.