Canadian authorities are unlikely to extradite one of the convicted killers of Bangladesh’s founding president, a Canadian diplomat said in Dhaka.
In October, Bangladesh requested Canada deport Noor Chowdhury, a retired major from the Bangladesh Army, who was among 12 army officers given the death sentence for the murder of Bangladesh’s founding president Sheikh Mujibur Rahman in 1975 .
Chowdhury lives in Toronto.
‘Our government has clear policy that we cannot extradite people to (a) country where there is the death penalty,’ Canadian high commissioner in Dhaka, Heather Cruden, told reporters after meeting Bangladeshi Foreign Minister Dipu Moni.
The Canadian envoy said that the Bangladeshi foreign minister raised the issue at the meeting and she would also take up the matter to her government as requested.
Mujibur, who led Bangladesh’s war of independence in 1971, was killed along with most of his family by a group of disgruntled army officers in a military putsch which overthrew the elected government.
The assassins were not pursued by subsequent governments. A murder case was filed only after Mujibur’s eldest daughter, Sheikh Hasina Wazed, became prime minister in 1996 and five of the convicts were executed in early 2010 after Hasina assumed office in second term.
Seven others went into exile in various different countries.
The foreign ministry found that one of the fugitives died in Zimbabwe in 2002, while the others have been residing in different parts of the world, including the United States and Canada.