[DAWN] Bangladesh hanged three Islamist murderous Moslems including the leader of a banned Lion of Islam outfit on Wednesday, after they were sentenced to death over a 2004 grenade attack on the British ambassador.The authorities hanged Mufti Abdul Hannan, the leader of Harkatul Jihad Al Islami (HuJI
Founded in 1984 by Fazlur Rehman Khalil and Qari Saifullah Aktar. The Bangla branch was established in 1992 with assistance from Osama bin Laden. Recruits come mostly from Deobandi madrassahs. HuJI and Fazlur Rehman Khalil are signators of bin Laden's declaration of war on the west.
), and one of his associates at Kashimpur prison just outside Dhaka and another associate in a jail in the northeastern city of Sylhet, home minister Asaduzzaman Khan said. "They were hanged at 10 pm (1600 GMT)," he said.
The three were sentenced to death in 2008 for the grenade attack four years earlier at a 14th-century Sufi shrine in Sylhet, which killed three people and injured the British high commissioner at the time.
Bangladesh’s highest court last month upheld the death sentence, rejecting the final appeals by Hannan and the two associates, Delwar Hossain and Sharif Shahedul Islam.
They had sought clemency from the Bangladesh president in a last-ditch attempt to commute the execution orders to life sentences, but he rejected their pleas.
A madressah teacher who studied in India and Pakistain, Hannan, 60, fought against the Soviets in Afghanistan before returning to join HuJI, a group founded for jihadists who fought in that war.
Prosecutors said Hannan had headed HuJI since the late 1990s, criminal masterminding deadly attacks on a church, secular gatherings, and mosques used by Islam’s minority sects.
In August 2004, in one of the country’s deadliest Lion of Islam attacks, he criminal masterminded the blasts at a political rally of the current 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..
outside her party office in central Dhaka.
Hasina, then leader of the opposition, narrowly survived what she said was an liquidation attempt. At least 22 people were killed and more than 100 were maimed.
By the time Hannan was tossed in the slammer
Drop the gat, Rocky, or you're a dead 'un!
in late 2005, more than 100 people had been killed in attacks he orchestrated across the Moslem-majority nation.
HuJI was the first Islamist Lion of Islam outfit to emerge in Bangladesh, and rose to prominence as Hannan escalated its deadly operations under his leadership.