Bangladesh court orders seven militants to hang

BANGLADESH: A Bangladesh court on Monday sentenced seven top Islamist militants to death for killing two judges in a bomb attack in southern Jhalakati town in November last year.

"They will be hanged until death," Judge Reza Tarik Ahmed said in his verdict.

The seven included chiefs of two outlawed groups - Shayek Abdur Rahman of Jamaat-ul Mujahideen and Siddikul Islam Bangla Bhai of Jagrata Muslim Janata Bangladesh.

"I pronounce this highest penalty as involvement of the accused has been proved beyond doubt," the judge said in a courtroom packed with lawyers and security officers, witnesses said. All but one of the convicts are in custody, police said. The other one is on the run and was tried in his absence.

Two judges were killed when a bomb was thrown at a vehicle carrying them to a court in Jhalakati, 300 km south of the capital Dhaka, on November 14, 2005.The outlawed groups, trying to turn Muslim dominated Bangladesh into a sharia-based Islamic country, killed at least 30 people and wounded around 150 in a spate of countrywide bomb attacks between August and December last year.

Meanwhile a ruling party politician hospitalized in a southwestern Bangladesh city was killed Sunday when unidentified attackers hurled a handmade bomb at his hospital bed, a police officer said.

No one was immediately arrested for the attack on Mofis Biswas, 37, a businessman and a local leader of Bangladesh Nationalist Party, police commissioner Khan Syed Hasan said in Khulna, 137 kilometers (85 miles) southwest of the national capital, Dhaka.

Biswas was admitted to the state-run Khulna Medical College Hospital for treatment after he was seriously wounded in another attack May 5 in neighboring Narail district, Hasan said.

Dhaka, Monday, Reuters, Ap