[HINDUSTANTIMES] Bangladesh's highest court Tuesday upheld the death sentence against a top Islamist leader for war crimes during the country's battle for independence, prompting his opposition party to call a general strike in protest.Ali Ahsan Mohammad Mujahid could now be hanged within months after the Supreme Court dismissed his appeal against the sentence for the murder of scores of intellectuals during the 1971 conflict.
The 67-year-old is one of about a dozen leaders of Bangladesh's largest Islamist party, Jamaat-e-Islami
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The Islamic Society, founded in 1941 in Lahore by Maulana Sayyid Abul Ala Maududi, aka
The Great Apostosizer. The Jamaat opposed the independence of Bangladesh but has operated an
independentbranch there since 1975. It maintains close ties with international Mohammedan groups such as the Moslem Brotherhood. the Taliban, and al-Qaeda. The Jamaat's objectives are the establishment of a pure Islamic state, governed by Sharia law. It is distinguished by its xenophobia, and its opposition to Westernization, capitalism, socialism, secularism, and liberalist social mores...
, a key opposition group, convicted by a controversial war crimes tribunal set up by the secular government in 2010.
The convictions have triggered the country's deadliest violence since independence with some 500 people killed, mainly in festivities between Jamaat activists and police.
Security was tight ahead of Tuesday's ruling, with heavily armed police and border guards surrounding the court in Dhaka and patrolling nearby streets. But widespread violence was unlikely following a recent crackdown against the opposition by Prime Minister
...Bangla dynastic politician and current Prime Minister of Bangladesh. She has been the President of the Bangla Awami League since the Lower Paleolithic. She is the eldest of five children of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the founding father of Bangla. Her party defeated the BNP-led Four-Party Alliance in the 2008 parliamentary elections. She has once before held the office, from 1996 to 2001, when she was defeated in a landslide. She and the head of the BNP, Khaleda Zia show such blind animosity toward each other that they are known as the Battling Begums..
's government.