Bangladesh executes Islamist linked to 2005 suicide attack

Dhaka, July 16 (EFE).- Bangladesh has executed a member of a hardline Islamist militant group for his role in a 2005 bomb attack that killed eight people, authorities said on Friday.

Asaduzzaman Ponir, 37, was hanged to death at the Kashimpur high-security prison near capital Dhaka at 11 pm Thursday, jail chief Mohammed Gias Uddin told EFE.

Ponir was found guilty of organizing the suicide attack on secular cultural group Udichi Shilphi Goshti in the northeast Netrokona district.

The alleged attacker was among those killed in the attack.

Jail chief Uddin said Ponir lost all his appeals against the death sentence.

Bangladesh’s President Abdul Hamid rejected his clemency petition in June.

“We sent his body to his village under police escort,” said Uddin.

Ponir was a member of the home-grown militant group, the Jamaatul Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB).

The Bangladesh authorities blamed the outfit for most of the militant attacks in the country in recent years.

Six of its leaders, including top leader Shaikh Abdur Rahman, were executed in 2007.

Between 2013 and 2016, Bangladesh suffered a wave of Islamist attacks with the assassinations of people from religious minorities, foreigners, LGBT activists, intellectuals, and bloggers critical of fundamentalism.

The authorities have blamed indigenous groups such as the JMB for the violence.

But global Islamist terror groups like the Islamic State and the al Qaeda branch in the Indian subcontinent have also claimed many attacks. EFE

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