Staff Reporter :
The foreign ministry on Thursday summoned acting high commissioner of Pakistan to Bangladesh and strongly protested a recent statement issued by its home minister on death sentence awarded to Jamaat-e-Islami chief Motiur Rahman Nizami.
Additional Foreign Secretary Mizanur Rahman handed envoy Ahmed Hussain Day a protest note in which the government termed the statement of Chaudhury Nisar Ali Khan as interference in the internal affairs of Bangladesh.
Earlier, on Saturday, the Pakistan interior minister expressed concern over the death sentence given to Nizami, reports APP.
In a statement, he said that though what happened in Bangladesh was that country’s internal matter, yet Pakistan could not remain divorced from references to 1971 and its aftermath. He said it was highly unfortunate that the Bangladeshi government was still living in the past and totally ignoring the time-tested virtue of forgive and forget.
He said that they had failed to understand the Bangladeshi government’s desperateness in digging the graves of the past and reopening old wounds.
The minister said that it seemed obvious to any independent observer that recent events in Bangladesh were a manifestation of serious political violations which were being inflicted on Bangladesh’s Jamaat-e-Islami for events before the independence of Bangladesh.
He added that he was deeply saddened to receive this shocking news and believed that the government of Bangladesh had misused the process of law against the Jamaat leader.
Earlier on October 29, Nizami was awarded death penalty for war crimes committed during the country’s Liberation War in 1971.
