The three-judge International Crimes Tribunal-1, set up to try crimes against humanity during the Liberation War in 1971, had rejected on Jan 3 three retrial applications by former Jamaat chief Ghulam Azam, current chief Motiur Rahman Nizami and executive council member Delwar Hossain Sayedee.
The court fixed Jan 21 for order.
The defence lawyers of the three Jamaat leaders largely reiterated their grounds for the application saying that the trial had been vitiated due to, what they said, collusion between the former Chairman and the prosecution.
The former tribunal Chairman, Justice Mohammad Nizamul Huq, stepped down on Dec 11 after BNP-leaning newspaper daily Amar Desh began publishing ‘transcripts’ of an alleged Skype conversation between him and a Brussels-based academic, an old acquaintance.
According to the defence, the conversations betrayed collusion between the judge and the international law expert in Belgium, one Ahmed Ziauddin.
The defence also supplied the court with material secured from a Gmail account that bears similarity with the former Chairman’s initials claiming that it had in its possession 230 emails that showed the judge was taking assistance from Ziauddin.
Both the prosecution and the defence argued on all three applications together since they were based on largely the same facts and law points.
The defence pointed out that there had been no denials that the transcripts or audio files available on the internet were not genuine and as such they were to be accepted as true.
The prosecution contradicted that contention saying that the defence had to establish authenticity since they were the ones making an application based on those documents.
The tribunal’s order rejecting the retrial applications had observed that the alleged Skype conversations had to be illegally recorded. The order said that it had to be resolved who had hacked or illegally recorded the conversation and where it had been done. Furthermore, the tribunal observed that such acts were illegal.
The Jamaat’s chief defence counsel Abdur Razzaq, arguing his review petition, said the recordings might not have been stolen at all. He said they could even be supplied by one of the parties involved.
Prosecutor Syed Haider Ali on Wednesday said the alleged Skype conversation, even if they were taken to be true, would only show that the judge was under pressure to give a verdict in December.
“It would show that he did not like it and was not going to succumb to such pressure. But nothing more,” said the prosecutor.