Bangladesh's Supreme Court on Thursday
rejected a final appeal by the leader of the top Islamist party against a
death sentence for atrocities committed during the 1971 war of
independence, lawyers said, meaning he could be hanged at any time.
The Supreme Court in January upheld the death
penalty for Motiur Rahman Nizami, head of the Jamaat-e-Islami party, for
genocide, rape and orchestrating the massacre of top intellectuals
during the 1971 war.
Nizami, 73, a former legislator and minister
under Khaleda Zia when she was prime minister, has been in jail since
2010, when he was charged with war crimes by a tribunal set up by Prime
Minister Sheikh Hasina that year.
The war crimes tribunal has sparked violence
and drawn criticism from opposition politicians, including leaders of
Jamaat-e-Islami, that it is victimizing Hasina's political opponents.
"All the legal battles are over," Nizami's
lawyer, Khandaker Mahbub Hossain, told reporters. "Now it is up to him,
whether he will seek clemency from the president, or not."
Hundreds of people flooded the streets of the
capital, Dhaka, to cheer the verdict, but there has been no report of
violence, although Jamaat called a nationwide strike for Sunday in
protest.
Authorities have deployed additional security
forces in Dhaka and elsewhere as similar previous judgments triggered
violence that killed around 200, mainly Jamaat activists and police.
No Peace Without Justice, a non-profit body
based in Italy, has called the tribunal's proceedings "a weapon of
politically influenced revenge whose real aim is to target the political
opposition".
The government denies the accusations.
The verdict comes as the Muslim-majority
nation suffers a surge in militant violence in which atheist bloggers,
academics, religious minorities and foreign aid workers have been
killed.
In the last month alone, five people,
including a university teacher, two gay activists and a Hindu have been
hacked to death by suspected Islamist militants.
The government has blamed the increase in Islamist violence on Jamaat-e-Islami, but the group denies any link to the attacks.
Four opposition politicians, including three
Jamaat-e-Islami leaders, have been convicted by the war crimes tribunal
and executed since late 2013.
About 3 million people were killed, official
figures show, and thousands of women were raped, during the nine-month
war, in which some factions, including the Jamaat-e-Islami, opposed the
break from what was then called West Pakistan.
But the party denies that its leaders committed any atrocities.
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