Shawdesh Desk:

The Bangladesh government has continued its diplomatic efforts to bring back MA Rashed Chowdhury and SHMB Noor Chowdhury, self-declared killers of the country’s founding president Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, respectively, from the United States of America and Canada without any progress so far.

Washington and Ottawa informed Dhaka on different occasions that the matters were under the jurisdiction of the justice departments of the respective countries and that there were legal complications in sending them back home, officials said.

The whereabouts of the three other fugitive killers could not be located yet, they added.

Asked about the update on the government’s move to bring back the fugitive convicts in the Sheikh Mujib assassination case, foreign ministry spokesperson Seheli Sabrin said that the Bangladesh government had continued its utmost efforts to extradite Rashed Chowdhury and Noor Chowdhury.

She said that Bangladesh raised its ‘just demand’ to send back the killers of Sheikh Mujib at all high-level bilateral meetings with the USA and Canada, reminding them that it not only hinders justice but also vio lates the human rights of the families and individuals deprived of justice if the convicts bypass punishments.

‘The foreign offices of both Canada and the USA have continued to inform us that the matters are under the jurisdiction of their justice departments with some legal complications, and the justice department is aware of Bangladesh’s demand,’ said Seheli, also director general of the public diplomacy wing, responding to a question from New Age in the past week.

She said that both Canada and the USA were not interested in resolving the matters through the political process.

Against this backdrop, the nation will observe National Mourning Day today, marking the 48th death anniversary of Mujib and most of his family members.

Foreign minister AK Abdul Momen said on Monday that the government would reward those who could provide information about the fugitive killers of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman.

‘If you can give us information, you will be rewarded,’ he said in a discussion on the death anniversary of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman at Jatiya Press Club ahead of National Mourning Day.

Describing Canada and the USA as countries with ‘very strong rule of law,’ he said that they should not shelter murderers.

Asked whether the US supported bringing back all the killers to justice and extraditing them to Bangladesh as at least one of the self-declared killers of Sheikh Mujib was still living openly in the USA, State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said at the daily press briefing on August 7 in Washington, ‘Again, we don’t comment on extradition matters.’

Momen on several occasions said that they had raised the matter with the US government time and again, but they always found some pretexts and did not send back Rashed Chowdhury, who got US citizenship in 2006, while the government was not getting any response from Canada about the repatriation of Noor Chowdhury, who was staying in the country on political asylum.

The government earlier sought the assistance of Interpol, an international organisation that facilitates worldwide police cooperation and crime control, and offered a bounty to find the fugitive killers.

Even 13 years after the execution of five convicts in the case, the government has yet to learn the whereabouts of three other convicts—Khandaker Abdur Rashid, Shariful Haq Dalim, and Moslem Uddin.

Mujib was assassinated along with all but two of his family members in the early hours of August 15, 1975, at his Dhanmondi house in Dhaka by a group of army personnel.

His daughters — Sheikh Hasina, now the prime minister, and Sheikh Rehana — survived the massacre as they were abroad.

Five of the 12 condemned army officers for the killing of Mujib — Syed Faruk Rahman, Sultan Shahriar Rashid Khan, Muhiuddin Ahmed, Bazlul Huda, and AKM Mohiuddin Ahmed — were executed on

January 27, 2010, a year after the Awami League-led alliance government had assumed office for the second time.

Another convict, Abdul Majed, was hanged on April 12, 2020, five days after he had been arrested at Mirpur in Dhaka on his return from India.

Among the six other condemned convicts, Khandaker Abdur Rashid, Shariful Haq Dalim, MA Rashed Chowdhury, Noor Chowdhury, and Moslem Uddin are still in hiding, and Aziz Pasha reportedly died in Zimbabwe in 2001.

Indian media reports, however, have claimed that the Indian authorities have handed Moslem Uddin over to the Bangladesh authorities. The government has rejected the claim.

The Bangladesh government has been pursuing a legal battle since 2018 by filing a case with the Canadian Federal Court seeking a ruling on disposing of a ‘pre-removal risk assessment’ petition submitted by Noor Chowdhury, as a protective shield to thwart attempts at his deportation, according to officials.

The Canadian federal attorney general’s office has submitted its deposition in relation to the petition filed by the Bangladesh government. Noor has also been made a party to the Bangladesh government petition.

The Canadian authorities were unwilling to deport Noor as the expulsion would be in conflict with a 2001 Canadian Supreme Court ruling that directs the government not to send back death-sentence convicts, except in the most exceptional circumstances, said the officials.

The government in January 2021 revoked the gallantry awards of the four convicted killers—Shariful Haq Dalim, AM Rashed Chowdhury, SHMB Noor Chowdhury, and Moslem Uddin Khan.