President Rejects Abdul Mazed's Mercy Plea

President Abdul Hamid has rejected the mercy pleas of Abdul Mazed, the death row killer of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, paving the way for the former serviceman's execution. 

''I've heard that President Abdul Hamid has dismissed the mercy pleas of Majed but I'm yet to receive the copy,'' Home Minister Asaduzzaman Khan said on Thursday. 

Hamid rejected Mazed's plea after it reached the president's residence on Wednesday night, hours after the convict filed the petition, a Bangabhaban source said. 

The jail authorities earlier said they sent the former army captain's petition for clemency to the home ministry.

His death warrant reached to Dhaka Central Jail in the afternoon, hours after a Dhaka court today issued it. Later, jail authorities read it out to him and asked whether he will seek pardon to the president, and he agreed, a high official of the central jail said.

The jail authorities read out the death warrant to him at the Dhaka Central Jail in Keraniganj.

He was arrested in Mirpur on Tuesday, four and a half decades after the murder.

Earlier on Tuesday, Dhaka Chief Metropolitan Magistrate AM Zulfikar Hayat sent Abdul Majed to Dhaka Central Jail in Keraniganj when Counter-Terrorism and Transnational Crime (CTTC) unit under Dhaka Metropolitan Police (DMP) produced him before the court amid tight security.

The Supreme Court on November 19, 2009, upheld the death sentences of Abdul Majed and 11 other self-confessed killers of Bangabandhu. Of them, five were executed on January 27, 2010.

They were Syed Farooq Rahman, Sultan Shahriar Rashid Khan, Bazlul Huda, AKM Mohiuddin Ahmed, and Mohiuddin Ahmed. Meanwhile, another killer, Aziz Pasha, died in Zimbabwe in 2001. The trial process began in 1996 when an indemnity law was scrapped as it was protecting the assassins.

Six other convicts, including Abdul Majed, were at large. After the arrest of Majed, five more killers still remain fugitive.

They are Khandaker Abdur Rashid, Shariful Haque Dalim, Noor Chowdhury, Rashed Chowdhury and Risaldar Moslehuddin Khan.

To locate and bring them back, a taskforce comprising of ministers and high officials of the foreign, law, and home ministries were formed in 2010. Rashed was traced in the US and Noor in Canada.

Majed is from Batamara village at Burhanuddin Upazila of Bhola district. His properties in his village have already been confiscated by the district administration.

The people of Borhanuddin expressed their satisfaction over his arrest on social media as they cannot come out of their homes due to the coronavirus fears.