(MENAFN- Gulf Times) A court in Bangladesh yesterday sentenced five militants from a banned Islamist group to death for killing a prosecutor, police said.
The five men, two of whom were tried in absentia, shot and killed prosecutor Haider Hossain in 2007 as he left a mosque after evening prayers.
Hossain was targeted shortly after six leaders of the outlawed Jamayetul Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB) were executed after being convicted for murder in a case that he had prosecuted.
The group's founder and supreme leader Shaikh Abdur Rahman was among those executed.
"They killed Hossain to exact revenge over the executions," government lawyer Golam Rasul said.
The judge at the court in the southern district of Jhalakathi ordered that all five defendants be hanged, police inspector A K M Humayun Kabir said.
The JMB was formed in late 1990s with a mission to establish a Sharia state in Bangladesh.
It carried out a series of bomb attacks that left 28 people dead.
The then Islamist-allied government led by current opposition leader Khaleda Zia initially brushed off the danger of Islamist militants in the country.
But they set up an elite force to hunt down JMB fighters after the group set off hundreds of small bombs across the country on a single day in August 2005.
Scores of JMB militants have since been sentenced to death, but none has yet been executed.
Child worker at brick kiln
A girl works at a brick factory in Bhaktapur, near Kathamndu. Child labour remains a major economic and social phenomenon in Nepal. Most of the displaced children work in brick kilns, stone quarries, coal mines, sand mines and majority of them are in the age group of 11 to 13 years. These children worked under the worst condition imaginable and face serious risk of injury, chronic illness or even death.
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