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The 'incomplete' verdict

Judge's comments raise serious questions
AT long last, we have a court verdict in the jail killing case arising out of the cold-blooded murder of four national leaders. Earlier, we saw the judgement delivered and convictions handed out in the Bangabandhu assassination case by a court under the ordinary law of the land, not by any special tribunal that would most probably have held a summary trial.
One shameful blood-stained episode followed the other within a matter of three months between August 15 and November 3, 1975 and the verdicts too have been delivered sequentially, although shamefully far removed from the time those two most heinous crimes in our national history were committed.
The point is both the cases went through legal processes, and in that particular sense, the supremacy of law as a principle stood vindicated, some weighty reservations expressed by the relatives of the victims and the legal experts regardless.
That said, perhaps as a precursor to enlightened national discourse and debate over the entire subject of justice or rule of law, we now raise the quintessential issue. Khondaker Mushtaq Ahmed promulgated the indemnity ordinance effectively whisking away the culprits of the whole series of assassinations, those of Bangabandhu, most of his family members, and the four national leaders Syed Nazrul Islam, Tajuddin Ahmed, M Mansur Ali and AHM Qamaruzzaman completely out of the rule of law. The Zia government took it into the statute book indemnifying those murderers under the garb of law. Khaleda Zia virtually proved acquiescent as she didn't initiate any legal processes against the self-declared killers. She stuck to the past even after the restoration of democracy from autocracy in 1991 and her coming to power in changed circumstances that raised hopes for making a new beginning.
The huge time-lags between the events, start of the legal processes and delivery of verdicts are rooted in the very moratorium that was clamped by the instrumentality of the indemnity law. So, it remained for the Awami League and its leader Sheikh Hasina to come to power in 1996 and annul the indemnity law clearing the course for trials in both cases. In matters of jail killing in particular, 29 years have passed before a verdict could see the light of day, albeit not without raising a plethora of questions.
There were three parts to jail killing -- the masterminding or the plotting of it, the passing of orders in whatever form, and the action part. It is only a plausible commonsensical inference to make that those who committed the crimes must have spared no effort to erase traces of evidence that could be held against them. Even so most legal experts believe that on the basis of witness accounts such as by the close relatives of some victims, the plotters could be identified and sentenced.
By the admission of the judge himself, the probe was flawed and if it hadn't been the case, 'some killers wouldn't have escaped death penalty'. The chief prosecutor of the case had said as much. So, that cast a shadow over the verdict itself.
The way the original team of prosecutors was replaced and the dates for pronouncing the judgement shifted conjure up a scenario that is bound to give rise to all sorts of questions about the verdict.
Given that the honourable judge himself found the investigation to be incomplete and felt that some others would have received different sentences if the IO's report was more thorough, we are forced to comment that justice has not been carried to the full.