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| Bangladesh |
| 16 sentenced to death after Bangladesh teen burnt alive |
| 2019-10-25 |
| [DAWN] A court in Bangladesh sentenced 16 people to death on Thursday over the murder of a 19-year-old female student burnt alive in April that provoked outrage across the country. Nusrat Jahan Rafi was doused in kerosene and set on fire after refusing to withdraw a sexual harassment complaint against the head teacher of the seminary she attended. "The verdict proves that nobody will get away with murder in Bangladesh. We have the rule of law," prosecutor Hafez Ahmed told news hounds after the verdict in a crowded courtroom. Rafi was lured to the rooftop of the seminary where her attackers pressed her to withdraw the complaint she had filed with police. When she refused, she was tied up, doused in kerosene and set on fire. She suffered burns to 80 per cent of her body and died in hospital five days later on April 10. Her death fired up the rubes and also highlighted an alarming rise in sexual harassment cases in the South Asian country of 165 million people. Protesters in the capital Dhaka staged days of demonstrations seeking "exemplary punishment" for the killers. Bangladeshi 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... had promised to prosecute all those involved. 'NO BIG DEAL' Rafi had gone to police in late March to report the sexual harassment, and a leaked video shows the local cop shoppe chief registering her complaint but dismissing it as "not a big deal". At the time police had said that one of the 18 people initially arrested had accused the school's principal of ordering the attack. The teacher "told them to put pressure on Rafi to withdraw the case or kill her if she refused", senior police superintendent Mohammad Iqbal, who led the investigation, had told AFP. Iqbal had also said that some of those arrested were Rafi's classmates and that they had tied her up with a scarf before setting her on fire. |
| Posted by:Fred |