Farhat Quader Chowdhury shows the print-out of a document which she said is similar to the verdict on her husband Salauddin Quader Chowdhury. Photo: TV grab
The family of war criminal Salauddin Quader Chowdhury today alleged that the verdict in the BNP leader’s war trail was available on Internet much ahead of pronouncement in the court.
“I have seen the verdict in some websites. I have downloaded and brought the copy here,” Farhat Quader Chowdhury, the convict’s wife, told journalists shortly after delivery of the judgement in the high-profile war crimes case.
She claimed that the judge’s copy from which he was reading out and the one she was holding are similar.
“According to the website, it was found in a computer of the law ministry,” she said posing a question how the judges could read out from a document of the law ministry.
She told reporters that Salauddin Quader informed the tribunal about the availability of the document on the website “but the judges ignored”.
“The judges could investigate that. But without doing so, they continued reading out the verdict. And what they read out is same as this excepting the last sentence,” she claimed.
Asked whether they were going to take any legal steps regarding this, she said: “We will think about it now.
“Though we know that we won’t get justice, we want to show the people of the country and world that what is going on here. That’s why we went through the whole process and we’ll go through the whole process.”
She complained that her younger son was not allowed in the court during the pronouncement of the verdict.
Rejecting the verdict, Fazlul Quader Chowdhury, their eldest son, said they found copy of the judgement on different websites since 10:00pm Monday.
“While they (judges) were reading, we compared the two and found both to exactly same,” he alleged.
Saying that the website which published the document said the document was found with law ministry, Fazlul said: “Since the documents match word by word, it is clear where the judgement is coming from.”
Alleging that the judgement was “dictated by the law ministry”, the BNP leader’s counsel Barrister Fakhrul Islam said there should a retrial since “the copy of the verdict originated from the law ministry”.
“The court itself should have arranged a retrial. Or the three judges should have resigned following the instance of resignation of tribunal chief Nizamul Huq resigned after the Skype scandal,” he said.
Source: The Daily Star