[Xinhua] Bangladesh's largest Islamist party chief Motiur Rahman Nizami...During the liberation war of 1971, Nizami formed the Al-Badr Force and acted as its supreme commander. The Al-Badr militia took active part in rape, extortion, looting and killing of Bangladeshis who supported the liberation, including a pre-planned massacre on December 14, 1971, when the Al-Badr militia along with Pakistan Army rounded up hundreds of doctors, professors, writers, and other Bengali intellectuals, and executed them...
was sentenced to death in capital Dhaka Wednesday for war crimes including mass killings.
The International Crimes Tribunal (ICT)-1 pronounced the verdict Wednesday afternoon on a crime against humanity case, awarding death sentence to the Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islmai party's President Nizami, who is now behind the bar.
The three-member panel of the ICT-1 read the summary of the 204- page verdict at a jam-packed court room in the presence of a huge crowd of people particularly journalists and lawyers amid tightened security measures in and around the tribunal.
The panel explained the 16 charges leveled against the accused 71-year-old Jamaat chief.
Nizami was indicted in 2012 with 16 charges of crimes against humanity,including looting, mass killings, arson, rape and forcefully converting people into Moslems during the war.
The indictment order, in a brief profile of the accused, said Nizami was a key organizer of the Al-Badr, an auxiliary force of then Mighty Pak Army which planned and executed the killing of Bangalee intellectuals at the end of the Liberation War in 1971.
After the verdict, International Crimes Tribunal prosecutor Tureen Afroz told news hounds that "eight charges, including murder against Nizami, were proved beyond a reasonable doubt leading to a death sentence to the leader of Jamaat."
Defense lawyer Tajul Islam told journalists that they will file a review petition, challenging the verdict of the ICT.
Five top Jamaat leaders have already been punished for their 1971 crimes and Nizami is among three other top leaders now being tried in war crimes tribunals Prime Minister Sheikh Hasian's Bangladesh Awami League-led government in 2010 to bring the perpetrators of 1971 to book.
Apart from Jamaat high-ups, a few leaders of ex-Prime Minister
Three-term PM of Bangla, widow of deceased dictator Ziaur Rahman, head of the Bangla Nationalist Party, an apparent magnet for corruption ...
's Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) are also facing trials.
Both BNP and Jamaat have dismissed the court as a government " show trial" and said it is a domestic set-up without the oversight or involvement of the United Nations
...an organization which on balance has done more bad than good, with the good not done well and the bad done thoroughly...
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Moslem-majority Bangladesh was called East Pakistain until 1971. The government of Prime Minister
...Bangla dynastic politician and current Prime Minister of Bangladesh. She has been the President of the Bangla Awami League since the Lower Paleolithic. She is the eldest of five children of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the founding father of Bangla. Her party defeated the BNP-led Four-Party Alliance in the 2008 parliamentary elections. She has once before held the office, from 1996 to 2001, when she was defeated in a landslide. She and the head of the BNP, Khaleda Zia show such blind animosity toward each other that they are known as the Battling Begums..
said about 3 million people were killed in the war although independent researchers believed that between 300,000 and 500,000 died.