Frustrated Bangladesh says it remains committed to extradite from US and Canada , the alleged killers of its founding president, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman.
Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and his family were brutally killed in Aug 1975 by some army officials, and out of the 12 convicted, five were hanged in 2010, one died and six are on the run.
One death sentenced convict Lt Col (retd) M Rashed Chowdhury is now in the US, while another Noor Chowdhury lives in Toronto Canada.
They were all sentenced to death in April 2001 in trials that Amnesty International reportedly declared were fair and unbiased.
Interpol has also issued a warrant of arrest against them.
The Canadian government has opted not to deport Chowdhury.
His refugee claims have been rejected and he is technically under a deportation order. But Ottawa does not extradite those facing execution overseas after Canada’s Supreme Court ruled in 2001 that it could not extradite fugitives without obtaining assurances they would not be executed.
There has been more rhetoric than tangible progress in bringing back the self-confessed killers of Bangabandhu over the past five and a half years., reported Prothom Alo.
The whereabouts of two of them are known, but their return is enmeshed in diplomatic and legal tangles. Yet there is a special taskforce in this regard, foreign legal consultants have been appointed and the concerned officials have made innumerable visits abroad, the paper said.
The government has said that the US and Canada have not responded positively to the repeated requests to return two of the six condemned killers. On condition of anonymity, several Bangladeshi diplomats in Washington and Ottawa recently admitted to Prothom Alo that there has been more rhetoric than initiative in bringing back SHBM Nur Chowdhury from Canada and AM Rashed Chowdhury from Washington.
Bangladeshi Law Minister Anisul Huq told Prothom Alo that a task force will hold a meeting shortly. He said, "The government is committed to bringing back the killers, but we are having to go against the tide." He said that they were maintaining secrecy in this regard due to the security issues involved.
Other than these two killers, the government has no specific information about the remaining four. The government claims that Abdul Majed and Moslem Uddin are hiding in India. India had been requested to extradite them.
Unconfirmed sources say that Khandakar Abdur Rashid basically resides in Benghazi, Libya and Pakistan. Shariful Huq Dalim has business in Kenya but sometimes travels to Europe and Libya.
Heather Cruden, the Canadian High Commissioner in Dhaka has said that the assassination of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and his family members was “a terrible, terrible crime”.
Cruden made the comment, though she declined to speak on the convicted killer Noor Chowdhury’s deportation from Canada due to “privacy laws”.
She was meeting diplomatic correspondents in Dhaka last week.
She said privacy laws restricted her from talking about Chowdhury’s issue, but she understood Bangladesh’s interest in repatriating him.
Cruden said she had visited the Bangabandhu Memorial Museum in Dhanmondhi where he was gunned down and his family was killed and that “it was a place of very powerful emotion and memory”.
“I cannot imagine what the family has gone through,” she said, days before Aug 15 when in 1975 the architect of Bangladesh was brutally murdered at his home along with all his family members except his two daughters–Sheikh Hasina and Sheikh Rehana-- who were abroad that time.
Sheikh Hasina is the President of his party Awami League and current prime minister of Bangladesh.
“The assassination of Sheikh Mujib and his family was a terrible, terrible crime,” Cruden said.