DHAKA: Police fired on Islamist demonstrators in southwestern Bangladesh yesterday, killing two as machete-wielding protesters went on the rampage over the conviction of a senior Islamist leader for war crimes.
Several thousand supporters of the country’s largest Islamic party, Jamaat-e-Islami, took to the streets in Satkhira district, attacking police with sticks and machetes and throwing homemade bombs, officers said.
Jamaat supporters set upon one officer as police tried to clear a road blocked by fallen trees in the town of Kaliganj.
“They hacked him (the officer) with a machete. We opened fire at them to rescue the officer. Two Jamaat activists were hit by bullets and they died,” district deputy police chief Tajul Islam said, adding that eight other police officers were injured.
Islamists and secular groups called rival strikes over the conviction and sentence of 90-year-old Ghulam Azam, the spiritual leader of Jamaat, for masterminding atrocities during the 1971 war of independence against Pakistan.
The war crimes tribunal sentenced Azam, whom prosecutors compared to Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, to 90 years in prison on Monday on five charges of planning, conspiracy, incitement, complicity and murder during the war.
Jamaat, a key member of the opposition, says the trials are aimed at eliminating its leaders. But secular groups say Azam should have been hanged.
Earlier verdicts against Jamaat activists, including three death sentences, plunged the country into its worst political violence since independence. At least 150 have been killed in clashes with police and paramilitary forces since the first sentence was passed in January.
Azam was the fifth Islamist and the fourth Jamaat official convicted by the controversial court set up by the secular government. Azam, the wartime head of Jamaat, was spared the death penalty because of his age and health.
Prosecutors had sought execution, describing Azam as a “lighthouse” who guided all war criminals and the “architect” of the militias who committed most of the wartime atrocities.
When India intervened at the end of the nine-month war and it became clear Pakistan was losing, the militias killed dozens of professors, playwrights, film-makers, doctors and journalists.
Businesses and shops were shut nationwide for the two-day strike which started on Monday, while roads and highways were largely empty, bringing inter-district transport to a halt.
Security was tight in the capital Dhaka, with thousands of police patrolling the streets.
AFP
