AFP
Dhaka
A suspected local militant confessed yesterday in a Bangladesh court to murdering a Japanese farmer, police said, one of a string of recent attacks in the country blamed on Islamist extremists.
Masud Rana, 22, was arrested last week over the killing of a minority Sufi Muslim leader in November and later questioned over the shooting of Japan’s Hoshi Kunio in northern
Bangladesh one month earlier.
Rana, a former student at a local Islamic seminary, appeared in court in the northern city of Rangpur accused of being a commander of local banned outfit Jamayetul
Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB).
“The militant operative admitted he was the key person, accompanied by two others, who shot Kunio dead in a rickshaw,” northern police chief Humayun Kabir said.
“We recovered a huge cache of handmade explosives and sharp weapons from his possession,” investigating detective Jahidul Islam said of his arrest.
The 66-year-old farmer’s death in October came just days after the gunning down of an Italian aid worker in the capital Dhaka, one of several attacks to be claimed by the Islamic State group.
The Bangladesh government says there is no evidence that Islamic State has a presence in the traditionally moderate Muslim-majority country, which has been left reeling from the attacks.
Five other men remain in police custody over Kunio’s death, but officers say they are still hunting for the mastermind
behind the attack.
Police blame the JMB for the recent violence while Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s government accuses the main opposition party and its Islamist ally of trying to trigger anarchy in the country. The parties
reject the claims.
Bangladesh has been roiled by the rising unrest which has seen four atheist bloggers and a publisher hacked to death this year, while several minority Sufi Muslim leaders and two
policemen have also been killed.
Kunio worked on a farming project in Rangpur, 300km (186 miles) north of Dhaka, where he grew grass for cattle.
Analysts say Islamist militants pose a growing danger in conservative Bangladesh, and a long-running political crisis has radicalised opponents of the government.
FINAL VERDICT ON WAR CRIMINAL IN JANUARY: Bangladesh’s Supreme Court yesterday said it will pronounce its final verdict next month on the last remaining 1971 war crimes convict Motiur Rahman Nizami, chief of the fundamentalist Jamaat-e-Islami who is on death row, media reported yesterday.
“The judgement will be pronounced on January 6,” attorney general Mahbubey Alam quoted chief justice Surendra Kumar Sinha as saying wrapping up hearing on Nizami’s plea to review his death penalty, originally handed down by a special tribunal and subsequently upheld by the apex court itself.
Alam in his concluding remarks sought the court to maintain its earlier verdict against 73-year-old Nizami for committing crimes against humanity and siding with invading Pakistani troops during the liberation war, when he led the much castigated Al Badr militia force.
But the attorney general said “Nizami must be sentenced to death for his war crimes against humanity otherwise the people will be frustrated”.
Nizami is the last remaining top perpetrators of crimes against humanity whose fate now hangs in the balance as Bangladesh’s International Crimes Tribunal (ICT) in October, 2014 sentenced him to death, a verdict which the Supreme Court subsequently upheld.
Nizami then sought to get the apex court verdict reviewed by itself in his last
ditch effort to evade the gallows.
“It would be a failure of justice, unless he is handed down the death penalty,” the ICT commented as it handed down Nizami the capital punishment last year convicting him of “superior responsibility” as the chief of Al Badr which is blamed for a systematic campaign to massacre a large number of top intellectuals just ahead of Bangladesh’s war victory.
Jamaat’s secretary general Ali Ahsan Mujaheed, who was also Nizami’s top aide in 1971, was executed two weeks ago along with Salauddin Quader Chowdhury, a stalwart of the key opposition BNP which is a crucial ally of the fundamentalist party.
Bangladesh so far executed four war crimes convicts since the belated process to expose to trial the top Bengali perpetrators of 1971 atrocities in line with the electoral commitment of Prime Minister Sheikh
Hasina in 2008.
Bangladesh says 3mn people were killed during the nine-month liberation war against Pakistan in 1971.
Kunio Hoshi, 66, was shot dead by unidentified assailants on his way to a farming project in the Rangpur district of Bangladesh on October 3.