Bangla HC sets aside military court trial of 1971 war veteran

Bangla HC sets aside military court trial of 1971 war veteran

Bangladesh High Court Tuesday set aside a controversial military court trial of 1971 Liberation War veteran colonel Abu Taher that sent him to gallows, calling the act a "cold blooded murder" by the then regime of president Ziaur Rahman.

"It was no trial at all... It was a cold blooded murder," a two-member High Court bench comprising judges AHM Shamsuddin Chowdhury and Sheikh Mohammad Zakir Hossain said in a verdict after protracted hearing on four identical writ petitions.

The verdict added: "Taher will be treated as a great patriot."

The judgement held former president Ziaur Rahman, an army general turned politician who founded the now main opposition Bangladesh nationalist Party (BNP), responsible for executing Taher and said "he (Rahman) would have faced murder charge had he been alive".

The court, however, asked the government to constitute a committee with reputed jurists, journalists and others concerned to investigate Rahman's role also in the 15^th August, 1975 coup in which the country's founder Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was assassinated along with most of his family members.

The verdict came on the four writs filed by Taher's family and political comrades in left leaning Jatiya Samajtantrik Dal (JSD), challenging the military law and regulations under which the military tribunal had been formed in 1976.

Taher, a Liberation War time sector commander who subsequently appeared as a left leaning politician on retirement from army, was the first Bangladeshi to walk to gallows in independent Bangladesh.

The military court tried Taher and handed down the death penalty on 17^th July, 1976 while the 1971 veteran, who had lost a leg in the Liberation War, was executed on 21^st July, only in four days after the verdict, in defiance of the jail code that suggests at least 21 days of time for executing death penalties after the judgement.