IANS/Dhaka

After completion of his seven-day remand yesterday, the editor of a Bangladesh’s pro-opposition newspaper was sent to jail in connection with a case filed over publication of a report on the Skype conversation.
Mahmudur Rahman, acting editor of the Bengali language daily Amar Desh and one of the government’s most vocal critics, was detained on April 11 from his office in Dhaka’ s Qbusy Karwanbazaar commercial district where he had been staying since the case against him was filed on December 14, 2012 to evade
arrest.
Quoting the case statement, a senior police officer had earlier said the charges brought against him include attempt of hindering the proceedings of the International War Crime Tribunal (ICT) dealing with the cases filed for committing war crimes against humanity during the nine-month war in 1971.
He said the charges brought against Rahman also include sedition and computer system hacking which the newspaper denied, saying it had collected the records of the conversation between a former judge of Bangladesh’s ICT and Ahmed Ziauddin, a Bengali citizen who resides in Belgium, from a source abroad.
During yesterday’s hearing, the defence lawyers submitted two separate petitions in which they appealed for giving Rahman a first class division in jail.
The controversy surrounding the ICT proceedings virtually took a severe turn in Bangladesh since the local newspaper published a report titled “transcript of Skype conversation.”
The ICT suffered a big jolt when the judge presiding over it resigned in January after the local newspaper published the report which showed that Ziauddin was playing an important role in the proceedings and that considerable pressure was being exerted by the Bangladeshi government to secure a quick verdict.
After returning to power in January 2009, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, the daughter of Bangladesh’s independence hero Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, established the first tribunal in March 2010, almost 40 years after the 1971 fight for independence from Pakistan.
The Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami party says Prime Minister Hasina’s ruling Bangladesh Awami League party has targeted the party to split the Zia-led 18-party main opposition alliance in which Jamaat is a key ally.
Apart from eight Jamaat high-ups, a few leaders of former prime minister Khaleda Zia’s Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) are also facing trials.
Leaders of Hasina’s 15-party grand alliance say Zia’s BNP is supporting anarchy to save the war criminals and hinder the development of the country.
In New Work, Human Rights Watch said on Tuesday that Bangladesh should immediately drop charges against and release four bloggers and a newspaper editor arrested this month.
All five are facing criminal charges solely related to the peaceful exercise of their right to free speech, it said in a
statement.
Human Rights Watch said Dhaka should stop targeting individuals and media publishing stories the government deems objectionable and re-affirm its commitment to freedom of expression, a principle which the governing Awami League has long claimed to champion.
“By targeting peaceful critics in the media and blogosphere and promising more arrests, the government is abandoning any serious claim that it is committed to free speech,” said Brad Adams of Human Rights Watch.
“Bangladeshis should have the right to peacefully express their views, and the state should address these demands through the rule of law instead of embarking on politically motivated arrests.”
“These bloggers can only be called political prisoners, since they are in jail for peacefully expressing their views,”
Adams said.
“Freedom of religion also includes the freedom not to believe in a religion and to make those views known. For a government that has always presented itself as liberal and secular this is a huge retreat from the values it claims to uphold.”