Thursday, November 6, 2014

Dhaka protests Pakistan home minister’s comment

The foreign ministry today summoned the acting high commissioner of Pakistan to Bangladesh and strongly protested a recent statement of its home minister on death sentence of Jamaat-e-Islami chief Motiur Rahman Nizami.
Additional Foreign Secretary Mizanur Rahman also handed Ahmed Hussain Dayo a protest note in which the government termed the statement of Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan as interference in the internal affairs of Bangladesh.
Terming the comments as unwarranted an inappropriate, the additional foreign secretary said: “They amounted to directly interring with the internal affairs of Bangladesh.”
Earlier on Saturday, the Pakistan interior minister expressed concern over the death sentence to Nizami, reports APP.
In a statement, he said that though what happened in Bangladesh was that country’s internal matter, yet Pakistan could not remain divorced from references to 1971 and its aftermath.
He said it was highly unfortunate that almost 45 years after that tragic chain of events, the Bangladeshi government still seemed to be living in the past and totally ignoring the time-tested virtue of forgive and forget.
He said one failed to understand why the Bangladeshi government was hell-bent on digging the graves of the past and reopening old wounds.
The minister said it seemed obvious to any independent observer that recent events in Bangladesh were a manifestation of serious political violations which are being inflicted on Bangladesh’s Jamaat-i-Islami for events before the independence of Bangladesh.
He added that he was deeply saddened to receive this shocking news and believed that the government of Bangladesh had misused the process of law as a political tool against the Jamaat leader.
Earlier on October 29, Nizami was awarded death penalty for war crimes committed during the country’s Liberation War in 1971.
http://www.thedailystar.net/dhaka-protests-pak-home-minister-s-comment-49063

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