Bangladesh executes killer of founding leader

Bangladesh has executed a military captain less than a week after he was arrested after nearly 25 years on the run over the assassination of the country's founding leader, a minister said Sunday.

Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, father of current Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, was killed along with most of his family in a military coup on August 15, 1975, nearly four years after he led Bangladesh to independence from Pakistan.

In 1998 Abdul Majed was sentenced in absentia to death along with a dozen other army officers over the murders. Bangladesh's Supreme Court upheld the verdict in 2009 and five of the killers were executed several months later.

On Tuesday, counter-terrorism police officers arrested Majed as he rode a rickshaw in the capital early in the morning. Bangladesh prison authorities carried out Majed's execution by hanging days later, after the country's president rejected a mercy plea from the convicted killer.

"He was hanged to death at 12.01 am Sunday (1801GMT)," law minister Anisul Huq told AFP, adding the execution took place at the country's largest prison, just outside the capital Dhaka.

Majed is believed to have fled to India in 1996. He returned to Bangladesh last month. Majed's wife met him at the prison one last time on Saturday evening when the prison authorities had scheduled his execution.

Security has been tightened at the areas outside the prison at Keraniganj town, with scores of policemen patrolling the jailgate, police chief of Dhaka district Maruf Hossain Sorder told AFP.