DHAKA: The leader of Bangladesh’s top Islamist party Jamaat-i-Islami is set to hang within days after the Supreme Court on Thursday upheld his death sentence for war crimes.

Motiur Rahman Nizami was convicted of murder, rape and orchestrating the killing of intellectuals during the country’s 1971 war of independence.

He was tried by a controversial war crimes tribunal set up by the government that has sparked deadly protests, with Jamaat and its ally the opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) saying it is aimed at eliminating their leaders. Attorney General Mahbubey Alam said jail authorities would begin preparing for Nizami’s execution once they received a copy of the verdict.

“We’re satisfied. Now there is no bar to execute him unless he seeks clemency from the president and the president pardons him,” he said after the Supreme Court dismissed the 73-year-old’s final appeal.

Security has been stepped up in Dhaka, already tense after a string of killings of secular and liberal activists and religious minorities by suspected Islamist militants.

Hundreds of people who had campaigned for the Islamist leaders to be tried for their roles in the 1971 war burst into impromptu celebrations at a square in central Dhaka and in the port city of Chittagong.

Published in Dawn, May 6th, 2016