BANGLADESH

The International Crimes Tribunal on Sunday declared a New Age article contemptuous but acquitted the accused with a strongly worded caution considering their image in the society.

The tribunal, formed to try crimes against humanity committed during the 1971 Liberation War, had on Oct 3 issued the contempt notice against the newspaper's publisher A S M Shahidullah Khan, editor Nurul Kabir, and special reports editor David Bergman.

All three, who were asked to respond, had decided to defend the article "A crucial period for the International Crimes Tribunal", written by Bergman.

After the daily newspaper's editor Nurul Kabir finished his statement in response to the contempt notice on Jan 19, the tribunal set the date to issue the verdict.

Bergman's counsel Mustafizur Rahman Khan also made a brief submission after Kabir finished his reply on Thursday.

CONTENTIOUS ARTICLE

The litigious New Age article primarily deals with the tribunal taking into cognisance charges against Jamaat-e-Islami's executive council member Delwar Hossain Sayedee.

One paragraph that had caught the attention of a tribunal member stated: "First, the tribunal seems to have taken cognisance for many of these twenty offences on the basis of looking at just one witness statement. It is difficult to see, unless the statements were extremely strong, how the tribunal could come to the conclusion that there is 'prima facie' evidence for the commission of an alleged 'crime against humanity' which took place forty years ago just on the basis of one witness statement."

Another part of Bergman's article reads, "What appears to have happened is that the tribunal did not look in detail at each and every alleged offence and consider how witnesses or other evidence supported the different elements of the offence."

In a later part of the article, Bergman wrote, "Moreover, there is a separate issue about whether the tribunal even had, in its hand, all the witness statements when it took cognisance."