[JURIST] Bangladesh officials on Wednesday executed two of five former military officers sentenced to death for the 1975 assassination of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the country’s founding president, just hours after the country’s Supreme Court rejected their petitions for review. The five men, Syed Faruk Rahman, Mohiuddin Ahmed, Baziul Huda, AKM Mohiuddin, and Sultan Shahriar Rashid Khan, had appealed an earlier ruling that upheld their death sentences. Under Bangladesh law, a convict sentenced to death has the right to appeal the final judgment of his case and can petition the president for clemency. Three of the five men had already made clemency pleas, which were rejected last week by President Zillur Rahman. The remaining three are expected to be executed shortly.
Mujibur was killed at his home, along with his wife and three sons, in a military coup only four years after Bangladesh won independence from Pakistan in 1971. His daughter, the current Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina Wajed, was abroad at the time of the killings and had promised to make her father’s murder trial a priority of her administration when she was elected in 2008 to a second term in office.