B’desh court awards death sentence for ULFA leader Paresh Baruah, 13 others

Dhaka/Guwahati: ULFA leader Paresh Baruah is among 14 people awarded death by a Bangladesh court on Thursday for smuggling into the country 10 truckloads of arms almost 10 years ago. India awaits official communication in the case.
A special court in Chittagong handed down the death sentence to Baruah and 13 others, including Jamaat chief and then industries minister Motiur Rahman Nizami and then state minister for home Lutfozzaman Babar, for smuggling into Bangladesh 10 truckloads of firearms in 2004, the Daily Star reported.
Baruah, who is United Liberation Front of Asom’s (ULFA) self-styled commander-in-chief and opposed to peace talks with New Delhi, is on the run.
“The verdict has been delivered on receiving permission from High Court division,” the report quoted Judge SM Mojibur Rahman of the Chittagong Metropolitan Special Tribunal-1 as saying.
A huge cache of arms was recovered on April 2, 2004, at the jetty of the Chittagong Urea Fertiliser Ltd. (CUFL) near the Karnaphuli river while being loaded on 10 trucks for delivery to the Indian separatist outfit ULFA.
These included 4,930 sophisticated firearms of different types, 840 rocket launchers, 300 rockets, 27,020 grenades, 2,000 grenade-launching tubes, 6,392 magazines and 11.41 million bullets.
It was the largest ever seizure of an arms consignment in the country.
Assam on Thursday said it cannot offer a reaction to Baruah being awarded death sentence until it receives “formal communication” in this regard.
State Home Secretary GD Tripathy said he has seen media reports that a court in Bangladesh awarded death sentence.
“However, we are yet to receive any official communication in this regard. I can comment only after I receive formal communication in this regard,” Tripathy said.
During the course of investigation, two charge sheets in connection with the case were submitted – one in the arms case after two months, and the other in the smuggling case after four months.
According to the Daily Star, the trial in both the cases started in 2005 “with several loopholes as the probes overlooked some important factors such as who had brought the arms, from which country, what was the destination, and how was a jetty of a state-owned body used for unloading the weapons”.
After a caretaker government took over in Bangladesh on Jan 11, 2007, there were new developments.
The court of Chittagong Metropolitan Judge on Feb 14, 2008, ordered further investigation following a prosecution petition and the cases took a new turn.
Muniruzzaman Chowdhury, a senior official, submitted two supplementary charge sheets in June 2011, accusing 11 new suspects.
Baruah was among those charged in both the cases.
Another media report said that Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) was among various local and foreign intelligence agencies that played a role in the 2004 arms smuggling case.
The Daily Star reported that a probe into the incident revealed the involvement of some top politicians of the then Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP)-led four-party alliance government, bureaucrats, ISI and ULFA. (IANS)