Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami banned

Dhaka, Aug 12: Bangladesh's High Court declared on August 1, 2013 that Jamaat-e-Islami, a right-wing party, was `illegal'. Jamaat, which opposed Bangladesh's independence in 1971 and committed heinous war crimes, will not be able to contest elections in the future. The verdict clearly shows that fundamentalism has no place in Bangladesh. People of Bangladesh welcomed the judgment and called it a victory of democracy and justice. Several top Jamaat leaders, including its 91-year-old supreme Ghulam Azam, were recently sentenced either to death or to long jail terms for masterminding atrocities during the Liberation war by the war crimes tribunal.