Dhaka: Bangladesh has hanged the five ex-Army officers, convicted for assassinating the country's founder Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, almost 35 years after he was killed in a military coup.
The five death row convicts were hanged past midnight (local time), hours after the Supreme Court rejected their review plea, jail officials said.
Ex-Lieutenant Colonel Mohiuddin Ahmed (artillery) and ex-Major Bazlul Huda were hanged first as the execution process started late last night while ex-Lieutenant Colonel Syed Faruq Rahman was the third to be executed minutes later.
Ex-lieutenant colonels Shahriar Rashid Khan and AKM Mohiuddin Ahmed (lancer) were the last to walk to the gallows.
The entire execution process took just 40 minutes to be completed, though it took 35 years to bring the putsch leaders to justice for the August 15, 1975 assassination of the former president along with most of his family members.
Bangabandhu was killed along with his wife and three sons, including 10-year-old Russel.
His daughters, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina and her younger sister Sheikh Rehana, survived the carnage as they were abroad at the time of the incident.
The five convicts walked to the gallows after a trial that dragged on for 13 years but six others condemned were still on the run to evade trial even as Bangladesh launched a diplomatic campaign engaging the Interpol to bring them back home.
Jail officials said Dhaka's district magistrate and deputy commissioner Zillar Rahman, civil surgeon Dr Mushfiqur Rahman and additional district magistrate Avijit Sarkar entered the jail before midnight along with Inspector General of Prisons Brigadier General Ashraful Islam as their presence were required during the hanging.
They said top home ministry bureaucrat or home secretary Abdus Sobhan Sikdar and Dhaka's police commissioner AKM Shahidul Haque also came to the jail just ahead of execution.
Elite anti-crime Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) troops, armed police battalion and plainclothesmen took positions around the jail complex reinforcing the regular police.
Witnesses said a police van reached the jail gate carrying five wooden coffins while another private van came to the scene with two wooden bedsteads which were likely to be used for ablution of the bodies after the execution.
Hundreds of onlookers crowded the streets outside the jail with many chanting slogans demanding executions, while witnesses said five ambulances arrived at the scene to carry the bodies. The bodies would be handed over to the relatives of the condemned ex-army officers.
Sixty-one close relatives of the death row convicts also met them for the last time. Two detained sons of Mohindin Ahmed were brought from suburban Kashimpur Central Jail to Dhaka Central Jail to see their father.
Earlier in the day, a four-member bench of the Appellate Division headed by Chief Justice Mohammad Tafazzul Islam pronounced the verdict after three days of hearing for five of the 12 convicted ex-military officers, who were in prison.
A jail official said a seven-member squad of hangmen from among the convicted prisoners at the Dhaka Central Jail and suburban Kashimpur prison carried out the execution.
"Learned (defence) counsels in all the petitions reiterated the points which were raised and argued in course of the hearing of the appeals (earlier). These points are not legal grounds for review of a judgement delivered on merit. These review petitions are dismissed," read the Court order.
A total of 28 people, including domestic staff, were killed when a group of junior army officers stormed Bangabandhu's private residence in a pre-dawn swoop.
The trial had started only when Hasina came to power in 1996 after 21 years of political wilderness and scrapped an indemnity law which was enacted by the post-1975 government to protect the assassins.
The post-1975 regimes had rewarded many of them with diplomatic assignments abroad and allowed others to float and run political parties at home.
The original trial court in 1998 had found 15 ex-army officers guilty and sentenced them to death but the High Court later acquitted three of them.
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