Detained staff of defence team freed

The International Crimes Tribunal yesterday directed the police to release a research assistant of Ghulam Azam's defence team detained while trying to photocopy 25,000 pages of evidence at a store.
It also directed the defence to use a photocopy store specified by the tribunal for its copying needs for the sake of safeguarding the documents.
The three-member tribunal headed by its Chairman Justice Nizamul Huq passed the order after Tajul Islam, one of the defence counsels of the former Jamaat-e-Islami ameer, brought the matter to the court's notice yesterday.
SM Zobayer Alam, the research assistant, was later released on the order's of the court.
He was picked up from the city's Nilkhet area around 2:00pm Tuesday while making copies of evidence for the case against Ghulam Azam filed in connection with crimes against humanity during the Liberation War.
Police had also seized the documents.
The lawyers had collected the documents from the tribunal to prepare for Ghulam Azam's defence.
“One of our representatives went to a store in Nilkhet to photocopy the documents we received regarding Ghulam Azam,” said Tajul Islam, “The police picked him up with the documents.”
Judge AKM Zaheer Ahmed, a member of the tribunal, responded by saying that maybe the incident happened because the documents were sensitive.
“The copies were provided for his [Ghulam Azam's] defence preparations, not for other purposes,” said Justice Nizamul Huq, adding that the documents contain information of witnesses along with other names, leakage of which could be risky.
The police might have detained him because of this reason, he added.
Tajul Islam said they wanted to make copies of the documents for all the lawyers in the defence team and since it has over 25,000 pages, it was inconvenient to copy them at the office.
He said the defence team has many lawyers.
The tribunal then directed the Officer-in-Charge of New Market Police Station to produce Zobayer Alam along with the seized documents before the tribunal by 1:00pm.
Zobayer Alam was brought before the court ahead of time at 12:30pm, and OC Mostafizur told the court they seized 108 volumes of documents from Zobayer Alam.
After hearing the OC, the tribunal passed another order saying that the detention and seizure of the documents may have been a mistake and the tribunal did not see any wrongdoings on the police officers' part as they were just doing their duty.
It directed the police to release Zobayer immediately and hand over the documents to Tajul Islam.
Talking to journalists, Tajul Islam condemned the incident and called it “disgraceful”. He said these forms of “harassment” are obstacles to justice.
He said the defence would submit to the tribunal registrar a name of a photocopy store in which they would like to make all copies of confidential tribunal documents.
Meanwhile, the tribunal yesterday re-fixed January 31 as the date to decide whether it would take the charges submitted against Jamaat leader Kamaruzzaman into cognisance. Although it was supposed to decide yesterday, the tribunal did not as the tribunal members could not finish reading the formal charges submitted by the prosecution.
Kamaruzzaman too is facing charges of crimes against humanity during the Liberation War.
Yesterday, the tribunal also postponed until January 24 the recording of the 15th prosecution witness's deposition in the case against Jamaat leader Delawar Hossain Sayedee.
The 8o-year-old witness could not be produced before the court due to his illness, Prosecutor Rana Dasgupta told the tribunal.
Sayedee is also facing crimes against humanity charges at the tribunal.
The tribunal yesterday asked the prosecution to have an alternative list of witnesses ready in case a witness fails to appear.
The court also fixed January 22 for passing the order on a defence petition seeking investigation reports against Sayedee.
On that day, the court is supposed to pass another order on a similar petition filed by accused Jamaat leader Abdul Quader Mollah.