[DAWN] Bangladesh's Supreme Court on Thursday upheld the death sentence of top religious party leader 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...
for war crimes, paving the way for his execution within days.
Nizami, head of Bangladesh's biggest religious party Jamaat-e-Islami
...
The Islamic Society, founded in 1941 in Lahore by Maulana Sayyid Abul Ala Maududi, aka
The Great Apostosizer. The Jamaat opposed the independence of Bangladesh but has operated an
independentbranch there since 1975. It maintains close ties with international Mohammedan groups such as the Moslem Brotherhood. the Taliban, and al-Qaeda. The Jamaat's objectives are the establishment of a pure Islamic state, governed by Sharia law. It is distinguished by its xenophobia, and its opposition to Westernization, capitalism, socialism, secularism, and liberalist social mores...
, was convicted of murder, rape and orchestrating the killing of intellectuals during the country's 1971 independence struggle.
"We're satisfied. Now there is no bar to execute him unless he seeks clemency from the president and the president pardons him," Attorney General Mahbubey Alam told AFP after the Supreme Court dismissed Nizami's final appeal.
Clemency has never been granted to a convicted war criminal in Bangladesh, and the 73-year-old is likely to be hanged within days.
Security has been stepped up in Dhaka, already tense after a string of killings of secular and liberal activists and religious minorities by suspected Islamist Lion of Islams.
In 2013 the convictions of Jamaat officials triggered the country's deadliest violence in decades, with around 500 people killed.
Nizami took over as leader of Jamaat in 2000 and was a minister in the Islamist-allied government of 2001-2006.
Prosecutors said he was responsible for setting up the Al-Badr pro-Pak militia, which killed top writers, doctors and journalists in the most gruesome chapter of the 1971 conflict.
Their bodies were found blindfolded with their hands tied and dumped in a marsh on the outskirts of the capital.
Prosecutors said Nizami ordered the killings, designed to "intellectually cripple" the fledgling nation.
He was convicted in October 2014 by the International Crimes Tribunal, which was established in 2010 by 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..
's government and has sentenced more than a dozen opposition leaders for war crimes.
Rights groups say the trials fall short of global standards and lack international oversight.