Kurigram murder convicts curse judge after being sentenced to death

In an unprecedented and ugly turn of events, murder convicts created chaos inside a Kurigram courtroom and aggressively expressed their rage on the judge concerned.

This came as a Kurigram court on Tuesday morning sentenced six people to death over the murders of four of a family in the district's Bhurungamari upazila, acquitting one.

One of the convicts has been on the run.

Reacting instantly to the judgment, the six convicts started vandalizing the dock they were on and verbally abused Kurigram's District and Sessions Judge     Abdul Mannan, said the court sources.

All the five convicts, who were present there, started calling the judge names and vandalizing the dock, before police calmed the situation and took them to jail, the sources said.

The convicts are Mamtaj Uddin, Nazrul Islam Manju, Amir Hamza, Zakir Hossain, Hasmat Ali and Jalal Gazi, with the latter being the fugitive.

The other accused, Nainul Islam, was exonerated from the murder charges, said state counsel Abraham Lincoln.

Claiming that justice was served to the victims through the verdict, the lawyer said the ugly reaction from the convicts proved how aggressive and cruel  they were.

Some masked perpetrators stormed the house of one Sultan Mia at the upazila's Diyadanga village on the night of January 14, 2014, the case dockets say.

They then indiscriminately hacked him, his wife Hazera and their granddaughters – Anika and Romana – to death.

Sultan's son Hafizur Rahman filed the case with Bhurungamari police station the next day.

Convict Mamtaj is the elder brother of victim Sultan and they had had a land dispute for quite some time, leading to the mass killing, the case statement adds.

Mamtaj had hired the rest accused, according to the plaintiff.