A court in southern Bangladesh on Saturday sentenced nine villagers to death by hanging for the brutal murder of a farmer over a land dispute more than a decade ago. Abul Hossain, 45, was attacked and killed by a gang of armed men as he was having tea at a wayside stall on the offshore island of Maheskhali on Aug. 25, 1991. The assailants hacked Hossain to death with machetes, and then cut up his body into 42 pieces, according to the prosecution.
| I can even, kinda sorta, understand killing somebody in a dispute over property. My understanding doesn't go as far as hacking them into a dozen pieces, much less 42... |
The victim's family filed a case in 1991, accusing 27 of their neighbors of killing Hossain to settle a land dispute on Maheskhali Island, which is off the coastal town of Cox's Bazar, 295 kilometers (185 miles) south of the national capital, Dhaka. After a two-year trial that began at a Cox's Bazar court in 2001, Additional Sessions Judge Motazidur Rahman on
Saturday convicted nine of the accused of the murder, while acquitting 16 others, said prosecuting attorney Shameem Ara Begum.
| Probably they won't convict you of murder if you just help mutilate the body... |
Two other suspects died before the trial could begin.
| Even neighbors have relatives... |
Only six of those convicted Saturday were present in court, and they broke down in tears as the judge passed down the maximum sentence of death by hanging for the "heinous murder." Three of the other convicted men are fugitives. "After more than a decade, I got justice for my father. I am very happy," the victim's son, Shah Alam, 35, said after the verdict.
| And it only took a dozen years. If they'd bumped him off using a method more subtle than hacking him into 42 pieces, it might have taken another dozen years. Seems like Bangla is following the old Indian legal traditions, in which suits could be handed down from father to son and sometimes took a hundred years to resolve, by which time all the interested parties had either forgotten what the original problem was or had wiped out each other's families... |
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