Dhaka hangs HuJI chief, 2 others for 2004 attack

Kashimpur, April 12: Bangladesh hanged three Islamist extremists, including the leader of a banned militant outfit, on Wednesday, after they were sentenced to death over a 2004 grenade attack on the British ambassador.

The authorities hanged Mufti Abdul Hannan, the leader of Harkatul Jihad Al Islami (HuJI), and one of his associates at Kashimpur prison just outside Dhaka and another associate in a jail in the northeastern city of Sylhet, home minister Asaduzzaman Khan said.

“They were hanged at 10 pm (1600 GMT),” he said.

The three were sentenced to death in 2008 for the grenade attack four years earlier at a 14th-century Sufi shrine in Sylhet, which killed three people and injured the British high commissioner at the time.

Bangladesh’s highest court last month upheld the death sentence, rejecting the final appeals by Hannan and the two associates, Delwar Hossain and Sharif Shahedul Islam.

They had sought clemency from the Bangladesh President in a last-ditch attempt to commute the execution orders to life sentences, but he rejected their pleas.

A madrasa teacher who studied in India and Pakistan, Hannan, 60, fought against the Soviets in Afghanistan before returning to join HuJI, a group founded for jihadists who fought in that war.

Prosecutors said Hannan had headed HuJI since the late 1990s, masterminding deadly attacks on a church, secular gatherings, and mosques used by Islam’s minority sects.

In August 2004, in one of the country’s deadliest extremist attacks, he masterminded the blasts at a political rally of the current Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina outside her party office in central Dhaka.

Ms Hasina, then leader of the opposition, narrowly survived what she said was an assassination attempt. At least 22 people were killed and more than 100 were injured. — AFP