ICT employee held
Star file photo
Law enforcers raided the chamber of convicted war criminal Salauddin Quader Chowdhury’s lawyer and seized documents and computers on Friday afternoon.
Meanwhile, detectives picked an employee of the International Crimes Tribunal and later filed a case under the Information and Communication Technology Act with Shahbagh Police Station. Two ICT employees including the detainee, an assistant to the SC Chy’s lawyer and several other unnamed people have been accused in the case.
Advocate Fakhrul Islam told The Daily Star that the detectives accompanied by Rab and police raided his chamber at Kakrail in the capital around 2:30pm.
During the one-and-half-an-hour drive, the law enforcers broke open the lawyer’s chamber on the first floor of the building and seized several documents including the certified copy of the judgment on SQ Chowdhury and his personal computers, he said.
Fakhrul, a resident of Dhanmondi, added that he was not present but his caretaker was there during the raid.
Talking to The Daily Star, Moshiur Rahman, officer-in-charge of Ramna Police Station, confirmed the raid.
A 164-page document, which did not contain judges’ observations or the sentence, was found online on Monday night with claims that a draft verdict had been leaked.
The Detective Branch of police began an investigation after AKM Nasiruddin Mahmud, registrar and spokesman of International Crimes Tribunal (ICT), filed a general diary with Shahbagh Police Station in connection with the leak.
On Tuesday, ICT-1 awarded the BNP leader the death sentence for committing crimes against humanity and genocide in Chittagong during the Liberation War in 1971.
Immediately after the pronouncement of the verdict, his family members and defence lawyers told the media that the verdict had been available in a few websites before the tribunal delivered it.
They also alleged that the draft verdict had been retrieved from a computer of the law ministry and that it was written by the ministry itself.
ICT the following day confirmed that an organised vested group had leaked parts of the draft verdict from the tribunal and uploaded it on the internet to make the war crimes trial controversial.
Source: The Daily Star