Two
former Bangladeshi ministers were among 14 people sentenced to death on
Thursday for aiding an insurgent group in neighbouring India to smuggle
weapons, court officials said.
According to the case documents, police seized nearly 4,000 firearms, ammunition and other military equipment on April 1, 2004, which the accused tried to smuggle to north-eastern Indian states to support the United Liberation Front of Asom.
ULFA, which had been fighting Indian security forces for an independent homeland for ethnic Assamese since 1979, declared a ceasefire in 2011.
The special court in the south-eastern city of Chittagong, 300 kilometres from the capital, Dhaka, acquitted 38 of a total 52 accused.
Lutfozzaman Babar, former State Minister for Home Affairs, and Matiur Rahman Nizami, former Industries Minister and chief of the current opposition Jamaat-e-Islami party were among those sentenced.
Babar and Nizami served in the cabinet of former Prime Minister Khaleda Zia between 2001 and 2006.
Mobarak Shah, a defence lawyer for Nizami, said that the trial was politically motivated and that he would appeal.
Many opposition politicians have been put on trial since Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina began her second term in 2009.
A special tribunal sentenced to death seven politicians from the Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami party and Zia’s opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party for crimes committed during the country’s 1971 liberation war against Pakistan.
According to the case documents, police seized nearly 4,000 firearms, ammunition and other military equipment on April 1, 2004, which the accused tried to smuggle to north-eastern Indian states to support the United Liberation Front of Asom.
ULFA, which had been fighting Indian security forces for an independent homeland for ethnic Assamese since 1979, declared a ceasefire in 2011.
The special court in the south-eastern city of Chittagong, 300 kilometres from the capital, Dhaka, acquitted 38 of a total 52 accused.
Lutfozzaman Babar, former State Minister for Home Affairs, and Matiur Rahman Nizami, former Industries Minister and chief of the current opposition Jamaat-e-Islami party were among those sentenced.
Babar and Nizami served in the cabinet of former Prime Minister Khaleda Zia between 2001 and 2006.
Many opposition politicians have been put on trial since Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina began her second term in 2009.
A special tribunal sentenced to death seven politicians from the Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami party and Zia’s opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party for crimes committed during the country’s 1971 liberation war against Pakistan.
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