Bangladesh hangs radical party’s top financier

Dhaka / AFP

Bangladesh has executed a tycoon and top financier for the largest radical party for war crimes, dealing a major blow to its ambitions in the troubled Muslim-majority country.
Mir Quasem Ali, a key leader of Jamaat-e-Islami, was hanged late Saturday after being convicted by a controversial war crimes tribunal of murder and abduction during the 1971 independence conflict with Pakistan. He was hanged at a high-security jail in Gazipur north of the capital. His body was taken to his ancestral village in the central district of Manikganj, flanked by police, for burial.
“Several dozen people, mostly family members, attended his funeral prayers,” local police chief Nazrul Islam said. Ali is the fifth prominent Jamaat leader to have been executed for war crimes following their trials at the tribunal set up by Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s secular government in 2010. The 63-year-old’s death is a major setback for the party which he had helped revive by setting up charities, businesses and trusts linked to it after it was allowed to operate in the late 1970s.
Security was tight before his execution, even though the party has in recent months eschewed violent protests in reaction to war crimes verdicts and there was no immediate sign of unrest. The tribunal has divided the country, with supporters of Jamaat and the main opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) branding the trials a sham aimed at eliminating their leaders.
The hanging comes as the country reels from a rise in militant attacks including a siege at an upscale cafe in Dhaka in July that killed 22 people mostly foreigners. Some 1,000 police were deployed in Gazipur before Ali’s hanging, officials said.
Jamaat called a nationwide strike for Monday, saying Ali was “murdered” for playing a “key role in the Islamic movement” in Bangladesh.