Chowdhury Mueen-Uddin, the British Muslim leader who faces the death penalty in Bangladesh for war crimes, is suing British Home Secretary Priti Patel for £60,000 in libel damages, reports the Daily Mail.
The 71 year old says he was defamed in a Home Office report last year.
In 2013, Mueen-Uddin was sentenced to death in absentia by the war crimes tribunal in Bangladesh for the killing of Bengali intellectuals in the last days of the 1971 Liberation War.
Mueen-Uddin, who fled Bangladesh after the war and gained British citizenship, denies claims linking him to the 1971 killings.
The lawsuit says the Challenging Hateful Extremism document by the Commission for Countering Extremism, was shared on the Home Office Twitter account which has almost one million followers. It was retweeted by Secretary Patel and others, including BBC journalist Mishal Husain and human rights campaigner Peter Tatchell, according to the Daily Mail report.
Mueen-Uddin claims the Home Office report’s publication caused him severe distress and embarrassment which was aggravated by the Commission’s failure to contact him before publishing the allegations, it said.
“He says he suffered further when the Home Secretary’s lawyers wrote to him in February, suggesting it was ‘fanciful’ that the report had seriously harmed his reputation,” reads the newspaper report.
A spokesman of the UK Home Office said Mueen-Uddin’s lawsuit relates to claims made in a report published by the Independent Commission for Countering Extremism.
“However, given the Home Office is the sponsoring department for the commission, we are unable to comment further while legal proceedings are ongoing,” says the Daily Mail Report quoting the spokesman.
Mueen-Uddin, who helped found the Muslim Council of Great Britain and was pictured in 2003 with Prince Charles while vice-chairman of the East London Mosque, claims the report libelled him by stating that he was responsible for serious criminal violence, including crimes against humanity, during Bangladesh’s War of Independence in 1971.
Mueen-Uddin, a father of four who lives in North London, insists he has not committed war crimes. He firmly says he is not a link between the perpetrators of the 1971 violence and the leadership of the Islamist Jamaat-e-Islami party’s UK branch. According to him, he is not and never has been, a senior leader of the Jamaat-e-Islami political group.
The International Crimes Tribunal in Bangladesh found leaders of the Al Badr militia, Mueen-Uddin and Ashrafuzzaman Khan, guilty of killing 18 Bengali intellectuals, a few days before the Pakistani occupation forces surrendered in Dhaka.
The two, tried as fugitives, were sentenced to death by hanging for abducting, torturing and murdering nine Dhaka University teachers, six journalists, and three doctors during the war.
Mueen-Uddin, however, says the tribunal has been widely condemned and discredited, citing Liberal Democrat peer, Lord Carlile, who described the tribunal as ‘not fit for purpose’ and the case against Mueen-Uddin as ‘nothing short of farcical.’
