Rights body moves HC, questions govt role

A human rights organisation has filed a petition in the High Court (HC) urging it to look into the government's role in October 7 execution of eight Bangladeshis in Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA), reports bdnews24.com. Asadujjaman Siddique filed the petition Tuesday on behalf of Human Rights and Peace for Bangladesh, his lawyer Manzill Murshid told journalists. The bench of justices Farid Ahmed and Sheikh Hassan Arif will hear the petition today (Wednesday), he said. Eight Bangladeshis were beheaded in public in Riyadh after they confessed guilty of robbing a warehouse and killing the security guard, Egyptian national Hussein Saeed Mohammed Abdulkhaleq, in April 2007. The Saudi Arabian ambassador in Bangladesh Monday explained that the execution was carried out in line with 'the law of Saudi Arabia' based on 'their confession of the crime'. Both the Saudi government and the Bangladesh embassy in Saudi Arabia said they could not fetch the convicts pardon, as the law states that only the victim's family can pardon such crime, and the family declined to pardon. But rights bodies across the world have severely criticised the incident, with Amnesty International pointing out that the confessions might have been made under duress. "We have seen media reports claiming that the convicted eight did not get any effective assistance from the embassy there, which is why we filed the petition," Morshed said. The petition marked the foreign secretary, overseas employment secretary, director of the Middle East affairs section of the foreign ministry, ambassador to Saudi Arabia and the labour council as defendants. The petition also urged the court to ask the government to form two separate committees, one under the foreign ministry and the other under the overseas employment ministry, to probe the role of the Bangladeshi embassy in Saudi Arabia and call for submission of their findings within four weeks. The rights body also requested the court to ask the Bangladeshi ambassador to Saudi Arabia to submit a report within two weeks detailing the steps they had taken to save the executed Bangladeshis.