The Appellate Division of the Supreme Court has released the full text of its verdict reconfirming the death penalties handed to militant leader Mufti Abdul Hannan and two accomplices for a failed 2004 assassination attempt against the then British high commissioner to Bangladesh.
Pledging loyalty to Harkat-ul Jihad al-Islami Bangladesh (HujiB), the three militants launched a grenade attack during a visit by the British envoy Anwar Choudhury to the shrine of Hazrat Shahjalal in Sylhet on May 21, 2004, killing three people.
The commissioner reported being hit in the stomach by a bomb, which then fell on the ground near the foot of the district chief and exploded "with a big bang". He sustained leg injuries while 69 other people were injured.
The UK foreign secretary at the time, Jack Straw, said he was "deeply shocked" by the attack.
The HujiB militant group was formed in 1992 and claims to have carried out at least 14 attacks, killing more than 100 people in the pursuit of establishing Shariah Law in Bangladesh.
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In December 2008, a Sylhet court issued death penalties to Hannan and his cohorts Sharif Shahedul Alam and Md Delwar Hossain, and sentenced two others to life imprisonment for their roles in the grenade attack. The High Court upheld the sentences in February 2016.
Later in the same month, the death row convicts appealed to the Appellate Division but to no avail. Attorney General Mahbubey Alam later told reporters that after the Appellate Division’s ruling there is no legal bar left to carrying out their sentences.
Hannan was also sentenced to death for the 2001 Ramna Batamul bombing, in which ten people were killed.