With Bangladesh sentencing former PM Sheikh Hasina to death, and the ousted leader still hiding in India, the future of her Awami League party looks grim.
Bangladesh’s International Crimes Tribunal (ICT) sentenced former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina to be hanged for crimes against humanity, prompting cheers in the packed courtroom as the judge read out the verdict on Monday.
Hasina, 78, had defied the tribunal’s order to return from India and attend her trial. The case against Hasina then proceeded “in absentia” (without the defendant present), with the judges ultimately finding her guilty of the deadly crackdown against a student-led uprising last year.
“All the… elements constituting crimes against humanity have been fulfilled,” Judge Golam Mortuza Mozumder read to the Dhaka-based tribunal.
The former leader of Bangladesh was found guilty on three counts: incitement, order to kill, and inaction to prevent the atrocities, the judge said.
“We have decided to inflict her with only one sentence — that is, sentence of death,” he added.
According to UN investigators, up to 1,400 people may have been killed in the violent repression of mass protests.
Hasina says verdict against her as ‘foregone conclusion’
Former Interior Minister Asaduzzaman Khan Kamal was also sentenced to death in absentia after being found guilty on four counts of crimes against humanity.
Hasina, who was assigned a state-appointed lawyer for the trial, called the verdict “biased and politically motivated” in a statement issued from her refuge in India.
The tribunal’s “guilty verdict against me was a foregone conclusion,” Hasina said.
She still has the option of appealing against her sentence — but only if she is arrested or surrenders, her defense lawyer Md Amir Hossain said.
Awami League denounces it as ‘scripted and staged’
The special tribunal was initially formed in 2009 to investigate crimes carried out during Bangladesh’s war for independence in 1971 against Pakistan. Now, it is looking into actions taken by Hasina’s Awami League (AL) party and its leaders during last year’s uprising.
Both Hasina and the AL have dismissed the ICT as a “kangaroo court” after it started looking into AL leaders.
“It was all predetermined,” Mohammad A. Arafat, a central leader of AL in hiding, told DW following the death sentence against Hasina. “Everything you saw (…) while delivering the judgment was carefully scripted and staged in front of everyone,” he added.