Bangladeshi Ex-Minister Jailed for War Crimes Dies

An elderly former Bangladesh minister who was sentenced to life in prison for war crimes during the 1971 independence struggle died on Saturday after a prolonged illness, an official said.

Abdul Alim, 84, an opposition official, was convicted and sentenced by the country's war crimes court last October on nine charges including genocide, murder and the persecution of the minority Hindus during the war against Pakistan.

While announcing the verdict, the International Crimes Tribunal said Alim, who was a minister when the current main opposition party was in power, deserved the death penalty but spared him the hangman's noose because of his poor health and age.

After a long struggle with lung cancer, he died at a Dhaka hospital while in custody on Saturday afternoon, Bangladesh's prisons chief Syed Ifekharuddin told Agence France Presse.

"His lung cancer spread to other organs of the body recently and he was admitted to the hospital on July 13," he added.

Alim was convicted of involvement in the killing of 372 Hindus in one of the worst single acts of murder during the war in the northwestern district of Joypurhat where he was a local head of a pro-Pakistani militia called Razakar Bahini.

Alim was one of a dozen opposition leaders including top Islamists to have been convicted and sentenced by the much-criticized tribunal since January last year.

The verdicts have triggered widespread violence and nationwide strikes, leaving at least 200 people dead.

Alim had been a member of parliament for three terms, and a cabinet minister in the 1970s under a government led by the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP).

The BNP, now the main opposition party, has said the trials are politically motivated, aimed at targeting key opposition figures rather than meting out justice.

Bangladesh has struggled to come to terms with its violent birth, when what was then East Pakistan split from Islamabad to become independent.

The government set up the tribunal in 2010, saying trials were needed to heal the wounds of the war. It says three million people were killed and 200,000 women raped, but independent estimates put the toll at between 300,000 and 500,000.

Unlike other war crime courts, the Bangladesh tribunal is not endorsed by the United Nations, and New York-based Human Rights Watch group has said its procedures fall short of international standards.