A Dhaka court sentenced 13 people to death and another 19 to life in prison for beating six students to death on suspicion of robbery in Aminbazar in 2011.
Dhaka Additional District and Sessions Judge Ismat Jahan announced the verdict in the case on Thursday, reports bdnews24.com.
Of the 60 suspects indicted in the case, three died in the decade that has passed since the incident.
The capital punishment recipients were additionally fined Tk 20,000 each. They were also handed seven years in prison and a Tk 10,000 fine on a separate charge.
The 19 jailed for life were similarly fined Tk 10,000. They, too, received seven years imprisonment and a Tk 10,000 fine on the other charge, with six months of additional jail time if they fail to pay.
The court also acquitted 25 suspects whose involvement could not be proven.
On November 22, the judge had set Dec 2 as the date of the verdict. She also scrapped the bail of the 42 suspects in the case and sent them to jail.
On the night of July 17, 2011, which was also Shab-e-Barat that year, the nation was stunned by the brutal murders of six youths in Aminbazar’s Bardeshi Village.
The victims were part of a group of seven students from educational institutions in Dhaka and had gone to the area on a sightseeing trip.
Locals, believing them to be robbers, caught, beat and slashed them. Six succumbed to their injuries, while one escaped with his life.
The dead were Shams Rahim Shammam, an A-Level student from Dhanmondi’s Maple Leaf School, Ibrahim Khalil, a second-year undergraduate student at Mirpur Government Bangla College’s Department of Accounting, Touhidur Rahman Polash, a second-year student in the Department of Physics at Bangla College, Tipu Sultan, a first-year student in the Department of Management at Tejgaon College, Sitab Jabir Munib, a second-year BBA student at the Bangladesh University of Business and Technology in Mirpur, and Quamruzzaman, a higher secondary student at Bangla College.
Al-Amin, the final member of the group, was seriously injured but managed to survive the attack. He was later able to give details of the night’s occurrences.
A case was filed at Savar Police Station over the incident by Sub Inspector Anwar Hossain against unnamed village residents.
A local businessman named Malek then filed a robbery case against Al-Amin and the other victims.
A judicial inquiry later found that the victims had not been robbers and concluded that the police had not properly fulfilled their duties in order to prevent the murders.
The investigation of the murder case was transferred from the police to CID and then to RAB under orders from the court.
On January 13, 2013, RAB filed charges against Malek and 59 other suspects.
On July 8 of that year, Dhaka Additional Sessions Judge Md Helaluddin indicted the suspects and began the trial.
The case took another eight years to complete after a protracted trial.
