DHAKA: A court on Tuesday sentenced three Bangladeshis to jail for making and selling a toxic paracetamol syrup that doctors say killed hundreds of children in the 1990s, a prosecutor said.

Judge Abdur Rashid sentenced them to the maximum penalty of 10 years’ jail after the first verdicts into the tragedy that saw children suffer deadly kidney failure after taking the syrup.

“They deserve the highest punishment under the country’s drug law as it was a heinous crime against humanity,” the judge was quoted as saying by prosecutor Shaheen Ahmed Khan.

The three were employees of a local drug company accused of replacing one of the syrup’s ingredients with a cheaper alternative normally used in the leather dyeing industry.

Helena Pasha, the owner of drug maker Adflame Pharmaceutical Limited, and Mizanur Rahman, the manager, were found guilty of drug adulteration.

They were taken into custody after the verdicts.

The court in Dhaka that handles drug-related crimes also convicted in absentia Nigendra Nath Bala, an employee in charge of production, who has been on the run since the trial began.

“Finally we see some justice. But I would have been happier had they sentenced them to death,” said Nurjahan Begaum, whose son, aged two and a half, died within days of taking the adulterated syrup for a fever.

“They deserve death. They killed so many children that there was not enough room in the cemetery for burial,” she said.

Published in Dawn, July 23rd , 2014