Two fugitive Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami leaders have been awarded death sentence by a Bangladesh war crimes tribunal allegedly for murdering country’s top intellectuals during the Liberation War in 1971. Pronouncing the verdict on 3 November, chairman of the International Crimes Tribunal-2, Justice Obaidul Hassan, said all 11 charges levelled against Chowdhury Mueen Uddin and Ashrafuzzaman Khan by the prosecution had been “proved beyond doubt”. In its closing arguments, the prosecution said the duo “deserved” capital punishment for the crimes “they had committed” in 1971 while the defence sought acquittals claiming that the prosecution “failed to prove the charges”.
The special tribunal said the death sentence would be executed after the arrest or the surrender of the convicts. This is the ninth verdict in the war crimes trial by the two tribunals initiated four decades after the birth of Bangladesh. Reports say Chowdhury Mueen Uddin now lives in London while Ashrafuzzaman Khan, now lives in New York.