Bangladesh: Court acquits ex-minister, a Khaleda aide, in Ulfa-linked arms case

A Bangladesh court on Wednesday acquitted an ex-minister sentenced to death for historic gun-running to Indian rebels, charges his lawyer said had been falsified by the now-ousted previous government.

Relations between Bangladesh and regional powerhouse India have been stretched after a revolution in Dhaka in August overthrew Sheikh Hasina, an ally of New Delhi.

Lutfuzzaman Babar, a former home affairs minister in his late 60s, was acquitted along with five others by Chittagong’s High Court, his lawyer Shishir Monir told reporters.

“The prosecution failed to produce any credible evidence”, Monir said.

He said Babar had been falsely implicated in the gun-running plot because he was a senior member of the Bangladesh National Party (BNP), arch-rivals of Hasina.

The case dates back to 2004 when Bangladeshi police seized 10 trucks packed with weapons, including rockets and grenades.

Police said they were being shipped to separatist Indian rebels, the United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA).

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The court also reduced the death sentence in absentia of fugitive Indian rebel commander Paresh Baruah to life imprisonment.

While the ULFA signed a peace deal with India in 2023, Baruah is a figurehead of a holdout ULFA splinter faction.

Baruah’s whereabouts today are unknown.

The five other people acquitted included former top intelligence officers, as well as the late Motiur Rahman Nizami, an ex-industry minister, who was executed in prison.

At the time of the gun-running case, the BNP of Babar were in power.

India had long accused Bangladesh of hosting separatist rebel groups, but after Hasina took power in 2009, she rooted them out.

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Babar was sentenced to death for arms trafficking in 2014.

During the height of the insurgency in Assam, during the 1980s and 1990s, about 10,000 people – many of them civilians – were killed.

Today, Assam is firmly under the control of the Indian police. The main ULFA forces agreed last December to disband, surrender all weapons and “join the peaceful democratic process”.

India was a key backer of Hasina, and the 77-year-old escaped Bangladesh by helicopter on August 5 to New Delhi.

She remains in India, infuriating many Bangladeshis determined that she face trial for alleged “mass murder”.