DHAKA: Bangladesh’s Supreme Court resumed on Tuesday the appeal hearings of five people sentenced to death for killing the country’s first president and independence leader Sheikh Mujibur Rahman in a 1975 coup.

“A full bench of the Supreme Court heard the appeals of five convicts. It was the first time since March 2002 the Supreme Court had heard the case,” Syed Anisul Haq, a prosecutor on the case said.

In 1998, 12 ex-army officers were given the death penalty, eight of them in absentia, for their role in the killing.

Among the eight, one died a fugitive in Zimbabwe in 2002. In June, the United States handed over another whose appeal case is now being heard along with the four others who are still in custody.

Sheikh Mujib died at his Dhaka residence on Aug 15, 1975 along with most of his immediate family and household staff.

Two daughters who were in Europe at the time survived. One of them, Sheikh Hasina Wajed, later took over as leader of her father’s Awami League party and eventually served as Bangladesh's prime minister.

The alleged coup plotters were initially protected by a law enacted by the post-Mujib government, and most of them were sent to foreign countries as diplomats. A murder case, however, was filed in 1996 after the government — led by Sheikh Hasina — annulled that law.

Proceedings in the cases ground to a halt after Sheikh Hasina was ousted from power in 2001 by a government led by the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP).

Sheikh Hasina has repeatedly accused the BNP of protecting the convicts and effectively halting the appeals to prevent the sentences being carried out.

She has alleged that BNP founder Ziaur Rahman — the army chief who became de facto ruler three months after Sheikh Mujib’s killing and installed himself as president in April 1977 — benefited directly from her father’s death.—AFP