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The former leader of Bangladesh’s Jamaat-e-Islami party, whose imprisonment on war crimes charges triggered violent protests last year, has died of a heart attack in a prison cell of a government hospital, officials have said.
Ghulam Azam, 91, died on Thursday after life support was removed at the Bangabandhu Sehikh Mujib Medical University in the capital Dhaka, hospital spokesman Abdul Majid Bhuiyan said.
A special tribunal last year sentenced Azam to 90 years in prison on 61 charges of war crimes during the Bangladesh 1971 war of independence from Pakistan.
Salman al-Azami, Azam’s son, who spoke to Al Jazeera from London, said that the family had never been satisfied with the trial proceedings or the judgement.
“It is very difficult, we are mainly upset that he had been deprived of a dignified death,” he said.”At such a frail age, any human being deserves to be with his family in his last days.”
“The accusation of the involvement of my father and the party leaders in the [1971] atrocities is ridiculous,” al-Azami added. “Our view has been to have a fair trial,” he said. “Those who are the real perpetrators should be brought to justice.”
Al Jazeera’s Maher Sattar said that the International War Crimes Tribunal was formed by the current ruling party Awami League and that the the main opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), led by former Prime Minister Khaleda Zia, has criticised it.
Official estimates suggest that close to three million people died in the eight-month war and more than 250,000 women were raped by the Pakistani army and its local collaborators. – AFP
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