Five Islamist militants from the banned JMB terror outfit were on Tuesday sentenced to death in Bangladesh for the brutal killing of a 66-year-old Japanese farmer in 2015 in the Muslim-majority country.
The murder was one of the first killings in a series of clandestine attacks on foreigners, Hindus and secular or moderate Muslim Sufis.
“They will be hanged until death,” Judge Noresh Chandra Sarker of the Special Court in Rangpur pronounced as four of the five detained convicts were escorted to the courtroom under heavy security cover.
The judge acquitted two of the six accused in the murder of Kunio Hoshi, a Japanese farmer who set up a farmhouse in northwestern Rangpur town, while a fugitive convict was tried in absentia.