DHAKA // Bangladesh sentenced to death the leader of the country’s largest Islamist party for war crimes on Wednesday, in a long-awaited verdict that triggered sporadic protests and violence.
The war crimes tribunal found Motiur Rahman Nizami, head of the Jamaat-e-Islami party, guilty of mass murder, rape and looting during Bangladesh’s war of independence against Pakistan in 1971.
Chief judge Enayetur Rahim sentenced Nizami to hang for orchestrating the killing of doctors, intellectuals and others during the conflict as head of a ruthless militia.
“It’s a historic verdict,” chief prosecutor Haider Ali said outside the packed and heavily guarded court in Dhaka.
Mr Ali said Nizami led the notorious Al-Badr militia “which took part in many heinous crimes”.
He was Jamaat’s leader since 2000 and a minister in the former Jamaat-allied government.
Security was tightened across Bangladesh ahead of the ruling after similar judgements against several of Nizami’s senior lieutenants plunged the country into one of its worst crises last year.
After the verdict was issued, Jamaat supporters took to the streets in several cities and towns to protest, clashing with police and border guards, but there was relative calm in the capital.
Police fired rubber bullets and tear gas in northeastern Sylhet to disperse demonstrators there, the city’s police commissioner said.
Smaller clashes and protests were reported in the towns of Nawabganj, Rajshahi, Sherpur and Mymensingh in the north.
Jamaat, more than a dozen of whose leaders are being tried for war crimes, called a three-day nationwide strike starting Thursday, saying it was “stunned” by the verdict.
“All sorts of security measures” had been taken across Bangladesh including deployment of extra police, amid fears the sentence could unleash a new round of bloodletting, said an official from the home ministry, Asaduzzaman Khan.
“We won’t tolerate any attempt to create instability or chaos,” he said.
Tens of thousands of Jamaat supporters fought with police and more than 500 people died in the earlier unrest and subsequent political violence ahead of disputed polls in January.
The verdict, originally scheduled for June, was postponed because Nizami was suffering from high blood pressure.
As leader of now defunct Islami Chhatra Sangha, prosecutors say, Nizami turned the student wing of Jamaat at that time into a pro-Pakistani militia which killed professors, writers, doctors and journalists.
The aim was to make the fledgling country an “intellectual cripple”, prosecutor Mohammad Ali said before the verdict.
“When it was clear Pakistan was losing the war, as the chief commander of Al Badr he ordered a ‘hit list’ based on which top intellectuals were abducted and killed,” he said.
Nizami is already on death row after being sentenced to hang in January for trafficking weapons and trying to ship them to a rebel group in northeast India.
His defence lawyer said he would appeal the sentence, saying Nizami was being pursued as part of a government witch-hunt against its opponents.
“It’s an unacceptable judgement. The court ruled beyond its jurisdiction. There was no evidence that anyone saw him killing,” lawyer Tajul Islam said.
Since it was established by Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s government in 2010, the self-styled international crimes tribunal has sentenced around a dozen opposition leaders for war crimes.
Rights groups have criticised the trials, saying they fall short of international standards and lack any international oversight.
The country’s secular government maintains the trials are needed to heal the wounds of the conflict, which it says killed three million people.
Independent researchers estimate that between 300,000 and 500,000 people died in the 1971 war.
* Agence France-Presse
