Bangladesh Jamaat enforces nationwide strike over chief's death penalty

Bangladesh Jamaat enforces nationwide strike over chief's death penalty

DHAKA, Oct. 30 (Xinhua) -- Bangladesh's largest Islamist party enforced a nationwide dawn-to-dusk strike Thursday in protest against the death sentence handed over to its chief in a war crimes case.

Shortly after the International Crimes Tribunal (ICT)-1 in capital Dhaka pronounced the verdict on the crime against humanity case, awarding death sentence to the Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islmai party's Ameer (President) Motiur Rahman Nizami, it called a countrywide strike from 6:00 a.m. local time Thursday to 6:00 a.m. local time Friday and from 6:00 a.m. local time Sunday to 6:00 a.m. local time Monday.

In the statement, Jamaat claimed that the government has filed ill motivated baseless cases against its top leaders in order to make the party leaderless.

"Charges which have been brought against Nizami are totally false, fabricated and politically motivated," it said.

Due to the hartal, traffic on the city streets remained relatively thin as most private vehicles were kept indoors.

Stray small incidents of clash, arson, vandalism, chase and counter- chase, detention have been reported in the capital and elsewhere in the country. No major incident of violence has so far been reported.

Additional law enforcers have been deployed in the capital to avoid any untoward incident during the hartal.