Draft of Supreme Court verdict upholding Muhammad Kamaruzzaman’s death penalty is sent to three judges.
A special tribunal, which held the trial of war criminal Muhammad Kamaruzzaman, has received the verdict rejecting the Jamaat leader’s appeal to review his death sentence.
The registrar office of the International Crimes Tribunal received the copy of the verdict around 4:30pm after the Supreme Court dispatched it to authorities concerned.
The tribunal will now send the 36-page judgement to Dhaka Central jail where the death-row convict has been kept.
After getting the verdict, the jail authorities will ask Kamaruzzaman whether he will seek presidential mercy. If he does not seek mercy, the jail authorities will fix a time for his execution.
Another copy of the verdict was dispatched to the Dhaka district judge.
Justice AHM Shamsuddin Choudhury Manik has written the draft of the verdict, which was approved by Chief Justice Surendra Kumar Sinha last night.
Earlier today, the draft was sent to the chief justice, Justice Md Abdul Wahhab Miah and Justice Hasan Foez Siddique. After scrutiny, they approved it.
The jail authorities cannot execute Kamaruzzaman unless they get a copy of the SC verdict, Attorney General Mahbubey Alam told The Daily Star yesterday.
In May 2013, the International Crimes Tribunal-2 handed Kamaruzzaman, key organiser of infamous Al-Badr force in greater Mymensingh in 1971, death for committing crimes against humanity, including mass killings in Sohagpur of Sherpur, during the Liberation War.
After he appealed against the verdict, the SC upheld the ICT decision on March 7. But the convict sought review of the judgment. Finally, his review petition was rejected on Monday by the four-member SC bench headed by the chief justice.
It left him with only one option – to seek presidential clemency.
As per the jail code, a convict gets a week to seek presidential mercy after the jail authorities receive the death warrant and communicates it to him. The death row convict is executed between 21 days and 28 days after receiving the SC order.
However, the jail code is not applicable to Kamaruzzaman as he was tried under a special law, the International Crimes (Tribunals) Act-1971, the attorney general told reporters on Monday.
As the SC ruling Monday, his family members were asked to meet him at the jail in the evening that day, which triggered speculations that the Jamaat leader might be executed the same day.
But the jail authorities could not proceed with executing the verdict as they did not get the copy of the judgement.
Source: The Daily Star
