Staff Reporter :
A Dhaka court on Tuesday sentenced five members of banned militant outfit Ansar Al Islam to death and another to life imprisonment for killing blogger and writer Avijit Roy in 2015.
Judge Majibur Rahman of the Anti-Terrorism Special Tribunal pronounced the verdict.
The condemned convicts are Maj (sacked) Ziaul Haque Zia, Mozammel Hossain alias Saymon, Abu Siddiq Sohel alias Sakib alias Sajid, Arafat Rahman Siam alias Sajjad and Akram Hossain Abir alias Adnan.
Two of the convicts — Zia and Akram — were tried in absentia while the rest are in jail.
The tribunal also fined them Tk 50,000 each.
The tribunal also sentenced Shafiur Rahman Farabi to life term imprisonment. It also fined him Tk 50000, in default, to suffer two years more imprisonment.
Earlier on February 4, the tribunal fixed February 16 for delivering the judgment after concluding the law-point arguments from both sides in the case.
The prosecution also sought death penalty of the six accused in the murder case.
Of them, Zia and Akram were tied in absentia.
Meanwhile, Rafida Ahmed Bonya, the wife of slain blogger Avijit Roy, has expressed discontent with the verdict in the case filed over the gruesome murder of her husband.
Mentioning a few other incidents of extra-judicial killings, Bonya said, “Simply prosecuting a few foot-soldiers — and ignoring the rise and roots of extremism — does not mean justice for Avi’s death, nor for the deaths of the ‘bloggers, publishers and homosexuals’ before and after him as part of the serial killing.”
“This verdict will not bring peace to my family or theirs,” she said in a Facebook post on Tuesday.
Bonya alleged that not a single person investigating the case reached out to her in the last six years, though she is a direct witness and victim of the attack.
“In January, the state lawyer in the case publicly lied, saying that I did not agree to be a witness in the trial. The truth is, no one from Bangladesh’s government or the prosecution has ever contacted me,” she added.
On March 25, 2019, the Bangladesh-born US citizen Avijit’s murder case was transferred to the Anti-Terrorism Tribunal.
On March 14, 2019, the Counter Terrorism and Transnational Crime (CTTC) unit of Dhaka Metropolitan Police (DMP) pressed charges against the accused.
On February 26, 2015, Avijit, founder of Mukto-Mona blog, and his wife Rafida Ahmed Bonya were attacked by some unidentified assailants near TSC on the Dhaka University campus while the couple was returning home from the Amar Ekushey Book Fair.
Avijit, also an American citizen, died at the hospital after an hour while Bonya sustained critical injuries. She was later flown to the US. Police said militants targeted the blogger for his writings Avijit’s late father filed a murder case against unidentified assailants with Shahbagh Police Station the very next day.
