The Bangladesh High Court on Sunday upheld a trial court order, confirming the death penalty given to two Islamists for the 2013 murder of a secular blogger that had set off a chain of attacks on liberal writers in the Muslim-majority country. A two-member bench upheld the death sentences for the two members of the banned Ansarullah Bangla Team (ABT), said court officials. The court also gave different jail terms to six others in the case, 16 months after a fast-track tribunal handed down the death sentences to the two ABT members for hacking to death secular blogger Ahmed Rajib Haider in February 2013.
"The HC bench confirmed the tribunal verdict after the analogous hearing of (mandatory) death reference and appeal hearing by the convicts who faced the trial," a spokesman of attorney general's office said. Redwanul Azad Rana and Faisal Bin Nayem, who were given the death penalty, were students of the top North South University. The 6 given varied jail terms included ABT's so-called 'spiritual guru' Mufti Jashim Uddin Rahmani, who was sentenced to five years of imprisonment after he was found guilty of provoking the students through his sermons to kill Haider. Rana, who is also the main suspect in the murder of writer-blogger Avijit Roy, is absconding. The ABT, said to be ideologically inclined to al-Qaeda, is one of the two main militant outfits active in Bangladesh. The other is the Islamic State-affiliated Neo-Jamaatul Muhahideen Bangladesh (neo-JMB), which carried out the July 1, 2016, attack on an upmarket cafe in Dhaka that killed 22 people.