Gulshan Cafe massacre: sentences commuted from capital punishment to life imprisonment

To the 7 Islamic fundamentalists who helped organise the 1 July 2016 massacre in which 22 people were killed, the Dhaka court reduced their sentences from a death sentence to life imprisonment

Dhaka (AsiaNews) - The High Court of Bangladesh has reduced the sentence of seven Islamic fundamentalists, members of the group that carried out the Gulshan Café massacre, from the death penalty to life imprisonment.

Yesterday, judges Sahidul Karim and Mostafizur Rahman of the country's High Criminal Court rejected the appeal to the death penalty, partially accepting the defendants' appeal. At the same time, the court fined them Tk 50 thousand.

The convicted are Jahangir Hossain, Aslam Hossain Rash, Hadisur Rahman, Rakibul Hasan Regan, Md Abdus Sabur Khan, Shariful Islam Khaled and Mamunur Rashid Ripon,that is the Islamist fundamentalists who had organized the terrorist attack in the Gulshan Cafe on 1 July 2016, a bar in the capital of Bangladesh in which 22 people were killed, mostly foreigners, most of them Italian and Japanese.

That night two police officers were also killed while carrying out an operation to free the hostages and in which the perpetrators of the massacre also died.

The first sentence in the case arrived on November 27, 2019: the Special Anti-Terrorism Court in Dhaka sentenced to death the seven members of the new JMB, the militia of Islamic fundamentalists who had organized and carried out the attack.

In Bangladesh, when a lower court sentences an accused to death, it must seek approval from the High Court. The rule indeed dictates that after the death sentence is pronounced in court, all documents relating to the case must be submitted to the High Court. Meanwhile, the defendants had filed separate appeals against the sentence. After the hearing on 11 October, the High Court had set the verdict for yesterday.

The first sentence had formulated the death sentence by punishing the defendants under a section of the Anti-Terrorism Act-2009 which however applies to "direct involvement" in the crime.

However those who took direct part in the attack were killed during the army operation, so with the new sentence the High Court found the convicts guilty of having planned, encouraged and helped the perpetrators, changing the sentence to life imprisonment, i.e. the most serious punishment for those who helped the participants of a massacre.