Dhaka court docket pronounces verdict within the 2004 killing of Humayun Azad by members of a now-banned Muslim group.
A court docket in Bangladesh has sentenced 4 folks to loss of life for the homicide of distinguished author and tutorial Humayun Azad in 2004.
Azad, 56, was hacked with cleavers by the members of Jama’atul Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB) on February 27, 2004 when he was on his approach house from a ebook honest in Dhaka.
He died in August that yr whereas present process remedy in Germany. Amid outrage over the killing, the JMB was banned the subsequent yr.
Azad’s homicide is taken into account the primary in a sequence of brutal killings of teachers, writers, bloggers and secularists in Bangladesh a decade later – between 2013 and 2016 – by Muslim right-wing teams. Most of them have been killed in broad daylight utilizing machetes.
Whereas saying the decision in a packed courtroom on Wednesday, Extra Metropolitan Periods Choose Al-Mamun stated the convicts – Mohammad Mizanur Rahman Minhaz, Anwarul Alam, Nur Mohammad Shamim and Salehin Sani – dedicated a “heinous offence”.
Amongst them, Sani and Shamim are on the run. A fifth suspect within the case, Hafez Mahmud, was killed in an alleged gunfight with police in 2014.
‘Delayed justice’
“It’s higher to get delayed justice than no justice in any respect,” Azad’s elder daughter Mauli Azad advised Al Jazeera after the announcement of the decision.
“It took 18 years to get a verdict. I'm nonetheless glad. I need the federal government to search out out the 2 who're absconding and convey them to justice as properly.”
Azad was an award-winning writer and professor of Bangla literature at Dhaka College.
He has greater than 60 publications to his credit score, together with seven poetry books, 20 novels and dozens of non-fiction books. In 1986, he acquired the Bangla Academy Award, the nation’s highest literary award.
In 1995, his ebook on fashionable feminism, Nari, was banned, three years after its publication, for offending “Muslim spiritual sentiment”. The ban was lifted after a protracted five-year authorized battle.
In 2004, his novel, Pak Sar Jamin Unhappy Unhealthy (Blessed Be the Sacred Land), which criticised spiritual fundamentalism, angered Muslim right-wing teams in Bangladesh, who began issuing threats to him.
Every week earlier than the deadly assault on Azad, Muslim preacher after which member of parliament Delwar Hossain Sayeedi advised the home the author’s work needs to be banned and a case of blasphemy be filed in opposition to him.
Sayeedi’s speech in parliament is alleged to have led to the author’s killing, although fees in opposition to the hardline politician have been dropped.
“He [Sayeedi] ought to have been implicated,” Azad’s youthful brother Manjur Kabir advised Al Jazeera.
In 2014, Sayeedi’s loss of life sentence for crimes in opposition to humanity throughout the 1971 warfare for Bangladesh’s liberation from Pakistan was commuted to a life sentence.
Dhaka-based journalist Shariful Hasan was a second-year scholar at Dhaka College when Azad was attacked. Hasan stated he was current on the scene and took the blood-soaked professor to hospital.
“It was the primary incident in Bangladesh when machetes got here out in opposition to the pen. Earlier than that, it by no means occurred,” he advised Al Jazeera.
In accordance with Hasan, spiritual intolerance started to develop in Bangladesh after Azad’s homicide.
“A couple of decade later, we noticed how writers and bloggers have been attacked and killed. If we may have served justice in Azad’s homicide sooner, the opposite murders may have been stopped.”
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