Hasina turned down idea of Moeen prosecution
The prime minister, Sheikh Hasina, had rejected calls to prosecute the former army chief Moeen Uddin Ahmed and members of the military-controlled interim regime.
At a meeting with the then US ambassador in Dhaka, James F Moriarty, on June 18, 2009, the ruling Awami League's general secretary Syed Ashraful Islam assured Moriarty that Hasina did not support the calls to prosecute the former army chief and interim regime officials.
Moriarty detailed the outcome of the meeting in a diplomatic cable he sent to Washington on June 22, 2009.'Both Hasina and her main political rival, Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) Chairwoman Khaleda Zia, were imprisoned on graft charges by the military-backed caretaker government,' Moriarty noted in the cable, released by WikiLeaks on August 30, 2011.
Terming Ashraful 'a voice of reason and restraint within the Awami League government,' Moriarty in the cable said, 'Ashraf said all but a handful of Awami League politicians supported Hasina's position to not seek revenge.'
The cable also reads, 'Ashraf confirmed that some Awami League colleagues did not want to stop extrajudicial killings by law enforcement agencies, which had been on the rise in recent weeks.'
Ashraf, also the LGRD and cooperatives minister, however, told Moriarty that he had hoped a case then filed by relatives of two college students shot dead by the paramilitary Rapid Action Battalion would act as a brake on extrajudicial killings, the cable said.
The minister also assured the ambassador of enactment of a law 'creating a Human Rights Commission.' According to the cable, Ashraf said that the trial of suspected war criminals in the 1971 fight for independence against Pakistan would be 'symbolic' and involve only a handful of people.
He predicted that the process of gathering evidence and taking the cases to trial would be a 'long process' that would take more than five years. The people convicted would likely receive lenient sentences.
While Ashraf acknowledged that the trial could strain national unity, he said that they were necessary to bring closure to a topic that continued to bitterly divide the country, the cable said.It said that Ashraf 'also disparaged the chairman of a parliamentary committee who is seeking to compel former members of the Anti-Corruption Commission to testify about their activities during the caretaker government.
Moriarty also noted that 'the committee chairman, Mohiuddin Khan Alamgir, was convicted in a case brought by the ACC.'
http://newagebd.com/newspaper1/frontpage/32952.html
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