Bangladesh sentences four to death for prominent writer’s murder

Dhaka court pronounces the verdict in the 2004 killing of Humayun Azad by members of a now-banned Muslim group.

A court in Bangladesh has sentenced four people to death for the murder of prominent writer and academic Humayun Azad in 2004.

Azad, 56, was hacked with cleavers by the members of Jama’atul Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB) on February 27, 2004, when he was on his way home from a book fair in Dhaka.

He died in August that year while undergoing treatment in Germany. Amid outrage over the killing, the JMB was banned the next year.

Azad’s murder is considered the first in a series of brutal killings of academics, writers, bloggers, and secularists in Bangladesh a decade later – between 2013 and 2016 – by Muslim right-wing groups. Most of them were killed in broad daylight using machetes.

While announcing the verdict in a packed courtroom on Wednesday, Additional Metropolitan Sessions Judge Al-Mamun said the convicts – Mohammad Mizanur Rahman Minhaz, Anwarul Alam, Nur Mohammad Shamim, and Salehin Sani – committed a “heinous offense”.

Among them, Sani and Shamim are on the run. A fifth suspect in the case, Hafez Mahmud, was killed in an alleged gunfight with police in 2014.