Jasim, 7 others indicted
A Dhaka court yesterday framed charges against the chief of militant group Ansarullah Bangla Team and seven former students of North South University in connection with the killing of blogger Ahmed Rajib Haider.
Ansarullah Bangla Team chief Mufti Jasimuddin Rahmani and six NSU students, now in jail, pleaded not guilty and demanded justice after Judge Ruhul Amin of the Fourth Additional Metropolitan Sessions Judge's Court read out the charges to them.
The seven NSU students are Redwanul Azad Rana, Md Faisal Bin Nayem alias Dweep, Maksudul Hasan alias Anik, Md Ehsan Reza alias Rumman, Nayem Sikdar alias Iraj, Nafis Imtiaz and Sadman Yasir Mahmud.
Of them, Rana is on the run and the charge was framed against him in his absence. In the charge sheet, Rana was shown as the “planner” of the murder.
Earlier in the day, the court rejected separate petitions submitted by the accused seeking their discharge from the case.
The court also fixed April 21 for beginning the trial of the case and issued summons to the complainant of the case to appear before it on the scheduled date to say what he knew about the killing.
DB Inspector Nibaron Chandra Barman, also the investigating officer of the case, on January 28 last year pressed charges against them.
The students had vowed to kill “atheist bloggers” after reading Jasimuddin's books and listening to his sermons, the IO said in the charge sheet.
They targeted Rajib “for his blog posts under the pseudo name of Thabababa” and got divided into two -- “intel group” to collect his details and track him down and the “execution group” to carry out the murder.
Arrested on August 11, 2013, Jasimuddin confessed before a magistrate that students, inspired by his sermons, might have killed Rajib.
Rajib, an activist of the Shahbagh movement demanding death penalty for war criminals, was hacked to death in the city's Pallabi area on February 15, 2013.
After the murder, radical Islamists had spread the propaganda that the Shahbagh movement organisers, including Rajib, were “atheists”. Hefajat-e Islam, a Chittagong-based Islamist group, began to press for hanging of the “atheist bloggers”.
Comments