Bangladesh extends army’s magistracy power by 2 months
The Bangladeshi interim government has extended the magistracy power given to commissioned army officers for another two months.
Bangladesh has executed a military captain less than a week after he was arrested after nearly 25 years on the run over the assassination of the country’s founding leader, according to the minister on Sunday.
Deputy Inspector General of Prisons Mohammad Towhidul Islam told to the media that the sacked army captain, Abdul Majed, was hanged to death in Dhaka Central Jail shortly after midnight.
Police arrested Majed in Dhaka on April 7 some 24 years after trial began against him and his fellow army officers for the killing of the “father of the nation”.
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He filed a mercy petition to President Abdul Hamid after his arrest. However, the President rejected the clemency plea.
The authorities executed five of the 12 military personnel sentenced to death for the murder of Mujib.
Their execution took place on January 27, 2010, a year after Mujib’s daughter, incumbent Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina came to power for her second term.
Bangladesh’s Supreme Court upheld the verdict in 2009 and five of the killers were executed several months later.
Earlier this week, counter-terrorism police officers arrested Majed as he rode a rickshaw in the capital in early hours of the day.
Majed is believed to have fled to India in 1996. He returned to Bangladesh last month.
Majed’s wife met him at the prison one last time on Saturday evening when the prison authorities had scheduled his execution.
Prime Minister Hasina, whose public celebrations this year for the centenary of her father’s birth have been hampered by the coronavirus pandemic, was in Europe with her sister at the time of the 1975 attack.
Hasina has also long accused Ziaur Rahman, president from 1977 until his assassination in 1981, of orchestrating her father’s murder.
This is denied by his widow Khaleda Zia, prime minister from 1991-1996 and 2001-2006 and Hasina’s former ally turned arch enemy who was convicted of graft in 2018, charges she said were fabricated.
(With inputs from agency)
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