DHAKA: Bangladesh yesterday defended the death sentences handed to 152 soldiers for mutiny as UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay called the crimes committed “heinous” and “utterly reprehensible”, but faulted the mass trial.
She expressed “serious alarm” at death sentences over the massacre of scores of army officers in 2009.
But Law Minister Shafique Ahmed insisted that the convicts would have an opportunity to appeal and denied that confessions were extracted through torture.
“The convicts have at least two tiers of appeal,” Law Minister Shafique Ahmed said, the day after a court in Dhaka delivered its verdicts against 823 soldiers who were on trial over a bloody mutiny nearly five years ago.
“No death sentence will be carried out unless they are confirmed in the higher courts,” Ahmed added. Lawyers for the soldiers on death row have said they will appeal.
But Pillay added in a statement from Geneva that “justice will not be achieved” by conducting “trials that failed to meet the most fundamental standards of due process”.
A total of 74 people were killed during the two-day mutiny in Dhaka, including 57 senior officers. Some were hacked to death or burnt alive before their bodies were dumped in sewers or shallow graves.
Executions by hanging are regularly carried out in Bangladesh.
AFP
