Mohammadi News Agency News – Features – Photo
MNA National Desk: The government has almost finished creating a legal framework for confiscating assets of war criminals from Bangladesh’s Liberation War, said Law Minister Anisul Huq.
“The task of forfeiting their assets began last year. Now, it has reached the final stage,” he said in response to a reporter’s question during an event at Brahmanbaria’s Akhaura on Thursday.
The demand to strip war criminals of their assets gained momentum in 2010 when the International War Crimes Tribunal set up by an Awami League government began prosecuting Pakistan Army collaborators.
It gained further momentum after a mass movement began in 2013 to demand maximum penalty for war criminals at Shahbagh square.
The government then promised to formulate new laws to seize assets of convicted war criminals, but there hasn’t been any noticeable progress.
In 2015, Liberation War Affairs Minister AKM Mozammel Haque said there were no laws for seizing assets from war criminals.
The next year the minister said family members of war criminals working government jobs will be expelled and war criminals will be removed from the voter roll.
Then in 2016, a proposal to confiscate the assets of killers of Bangabandhu and the convicted war criminals was passed unanimously.
Bangladesh’s war to secede from Pakistan was opposed by Jamaat-e-Islami and several other Islamist political parties, whose members actively aided invading Pakistani forces to carry our mass killings, systematic rapes, abductions, torture, executions, arsons, lootings and forced conversions.
Rajakar, Al Badr, Al Shams were the militias formed to assist in carrying out crimes against humanity against Bengalees to suppress the freedom movement.
Of the seven top Jamaat leaders and one BNP leader convicted of crimes against humanity during 1971, death penalties have already been carried out against six of them. Several others who are carrying death penalties are awaiting appeal decisions.
