Dozens killed in Bangladesh after Islamist leader is sentenced to death
At least 44 people have died in clashes throughout Bangladesh after the leader of an Islamic party was sentenced to death for rapes and murders committed during the country's 1971 war of independence.
Jamaat-e-Islami activists march with sticks and set fires in the street during a clash with police in Rajshahi north-west from Dhaka Photo: AFP
By Dean Nelson, David Bergman in Dhaka
11:54AM GMT 01 Mar 2013
Violence continued on Friday in a series of battles between police and supporters of the Jamaat-e-Islami, Bangladesh's fourth largest political party, in the capital Dhaka and Chittagong.
More than 20 of the dead are believed to have been killed by police who opened fire on protesters with rubber bullets.
The violence erupted amid already heightened tensions in Dhaka where thousands of anti-Jamaat protesters have been gathering daily to demand that those convicted of war crimes be hung.
Jamaat-e-Islami supporters were also on the streets as part of a national strike against two war crimes tribunals prosecuting nine of its party leaders. They said the trials are politically-motivated and in breach of international standards of justice.
In the latest violence after Delwar Hossain Sayedee was sentenced to death, four policemen were killed when protesters attacked a police station in Gaibandia in the north of the country, two of whom were stabbed to death.
A police constable in Chittagong also died from stab wounds. According to the local Daily Star newspaper a 22-year-old supporter of the Awami League government supporter was beaten to death by protesters in Gaibandia.
A second day of protests and clashes followed a call by Jamaat-e-Islami leaders for its supporters to gather at mosques throughout the country after Friday prayers. Bangladesh's law minister said the Islamic party was "trying to plunge the nation into anarchy."
The main opposition party and Jamaat ally, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, led by former prime minister Khaleda Zia, has accused the government of deliberately carrying out "mass killings".
The 1971 war of independence, in which the Pakistan Army and local Muslim League and other Islamic party allies are accused of killing between 500,000 and three million civilians and raping thousands of women, continues to overshadow Bangladeshi politics today. Efforts to bring to justice those accused of atrocities in the war have exposed the scale of division in the country.
Thousands joined protests in Dhaka's Shahbag area last month after one of the tribunals sentenced another Jamaat leader, Abdul Quader Mollah, to life imprisonment, which was widely seen as lenient.
Sayedee one of ten accused of war crimes and the third to be convicted, but there has been strong criticism of the tribunals. In December last year the chairman of the tribunal hearing Sayedee's trial was forced to resign after it emerged he had been colluding with the prosecution.
