Dhaka, June 01: Bangladeshi authorities today jailed 54 activists of the largest Islamist party Jamaat that had planed a rally here to oppose the trial of those accused of genocide during the 1971 ‘Liberation War’.
The police detained nearly 100 activists of radical Jamaat-e-Islami (JI) ahead of their planned rally in the capital defying a government ban.
“We earlier detained some 100 Jamaat workers but later arrested 54 of them” as JI vowed to go ahead with their planned rally at the city’s Paltan Maidan, the police said.
A Dhaka court later ordered that they be sent to jail as police said the JI cadres had gathered at different places in the capital defying the ban order.
The Jamaat, however, later postponed their rally as riot police and the elite anti-crime Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) troops enforced a sharp vigil at the rally ground.
The Jamaat, which was a crucial partner in the previous Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP)-led government, planned the rally as the government has vowed to expose several of their top leaders for alleged “crimes against humanity” during the Liberation War against Pakistan.
Dhaka Metropolitan Police had imposed the ban on all meetings and rallies in the capital amid fears of law and order problem.
The party’s secretary general Ali Ahsan Mohammed Mujahid, at a press conference later, said the government’s move to hold war crimes trial “will disappear without trace”. “War crimes trial is a falsehood. We don’t take it seriously. God willing, it will be vanish into thin air,” he said.
Earlier reports said authorities have gathered evidence against 25 high-profile “war criminals”, mostly from the Jamaat. The Jamaat leaders claimed that people did not endorse the war crimes trial and the trial initiatives “was nothing but a conspiracy of the Awami League with its local and foreign cohorts”.
On March 25, the government has set up a three-member special tribunal for the trial of “war criminals” accused of genocide and those who sided with the Pakistani military during the ‘Liberation War’.
Jamaat’s chief Motiur Rahman Nizami and secretary general Mojahid led the so-called Al-Badr forces, which is widely believed to have been involved in genocide, rape and murder of frontline intellectuals in an effort to cripple the emerging nation.
According to official figures, Pakistani troops, aided by local collaborators, killed an estimated 3 million people, raped about 200,000 women and forced millions more to leave their homes during the bloody nine-month guerrilla war.
—-PTI