BANGLADESH Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina has urged Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to extradite her father’s killer, Nur Chowdhury, who has been living in Canada since 1996. The two leaders met recently following the G7 Summit in Quebec.
The Daily Star of Bangladesh reports that Hasina’s press secretary said that Hasina called for Trudeau’s “personal initiative for immediate extradition of the self-confessed killer, one of the two assassins who directly shot Father of the Nation Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman dead.”
The main hindrance to extraditing Chowdhury is that Canada doesn’t approve deporting a person to a country where he could be executed.
According to the Bangladeshi newspaper, Trudeau told Hasina that Chowdhury could not get citizenship in Canada. He sympathized with her and told her that officials here were quietly engaged in dealing with the issue.
BACK in March 2010, I wrote the following piece titled, “Send the Bangladeshi ‘Killer’ Back!”:
MACLEAN’S magazine … this week wrote a really interesting piece on Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina asking Canada to extradite former Bangladeshi military officer Nur Chowdhury to Bangladesh to face justice in the horrendous massacre of her family in 1975 by army officers.
Her father, then Bangladeshi President Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, who was the country’s independence leader, along with her mother, three brothers, two sisters-in-law and about 20 others were killed in the military coup – just four years after India liberated the country, former East Pakistan, by swift military action. Indira Gandhi was the Prime Minister of India at the time. Hasina herself escaped death because she was out of the country.
In 1998, the court ordered the execution of 15 people for the massacre; three were later acquitted.
In 2001, the trial was stopped when Khaleda Zia was elected prime minister.
But in 2007 the case resumed and last November [2009], the Supreme Court rejected appeals by five former army officers accused in the killings.
In January [2010], the court dismissed their final appeals and they were hanged.
Six others who have been sentenced to death fled the country while a seventh convicted man is believed to have died abroad.
Chowdhury’s refugee application has been turned down by Canada but we refuse to send him back to Bangladesh because Canada typically does not transfer a suspected criminal to another country without a guarantee that they will not be executed.
In this case, the government should extradite him, as Hasina told Maclean’s: “These killers violated human rights. THEY KILLED WOMEN AND CHILDREN. So why should [Canada] keep him? If they want to keep the killers, we can send all the killers of this country to take shelter in Canada and other countries.” [Capitalization mine.]
Exactly my point!
Not sending this man back to Bangladesh is SENDING A WRONG MESSAGE to killers all over the world.
