Bangladesh court clears the way for Molla’s execution

DHAKA: Bangladesh’s highest court on Thursday upheld the death penalty for a top Islamist leader convicted of war crimes, just two days after he was given a dramatic last-minute reprieve from execution.
The Supreme Court headed by Chief Justice Muzammel Hossain “dismissed” Abdul Quader Molla’s appeal for a final review of his death sentence, meaning he could now be hanged as early as midnight Thursday.
“There is now no legal bar to execute him,” Attorney General Mahbubey Alam told AFP in the court, amid applause by pro-government lawyers.
On Tuesday night a judge stayed the hanging of Molla, just 90 minutes before his scheduled execution at a jail in Dhaka, amid a global outcry over the fairness of his and other trials held for alleged war crimes.
Molla, a leader of the Jamaat-e-Islami party leader, would have been 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.
A key opposition leader, the 65-year-old 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.
Molla was convicted of rape, murder and mass murder, including the killing of more than 350 unarmed Bengali civilians.
Since Wednesday the Supreme Court has heard an appeal on whether Molla could seek a review of the death sentence, with his lawyers arguing that he had “a constitutional right” to do so.
However Attorney General Alam told the court that there was “no scope for a review in war crimes cases.”
Molla is assistant secretary-general of the Jamaat-e-Islami party, which is barred from contesting elections but plays a key role in the opposition movement led by the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP).
He is one of five Jamaat leaders condemned to death by Bangladesh’s International Crimes Tribunal (ICT), set up in 2010 to investigate atrocities perpetrated during the 1971 conflict, in which three million people died.
Critics of the tribunal say it has been used as a political tool by Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, who is locked in a long and poisonous feud with BNP leader Begum Khaleda Zia, as a way of weakening the opposition as Jan. 5 elections approach.
But many Bangladeshis support the court, believing that those convicted of war crimes should be punished, underlining how the events of 42 years ago still resonate in an impoverished nation of 160 million deeply divided over the role for Islam.