After campaigns for his release by Islamists for several months and the intervention of the law adviser, former Chittagong University student and extremist militant Shafiur Rahman Farabi got anticipatory bail from the High Court.
The bench of Justice Zakir Hossain and Justice KM Rasheduzzaman Raja passed the order after hearing his petition on Wednesday. Earlier, on February 26, 2015, secularist blogger and US-based scientist Avijit Roy was hacked to death in public in the Dhaka University area.
Hizb ut-Tahrir activist Farabi had been in jail since March 3 of the same year for threatening Avijit with death and provoking the murder.
On February 16, 2021, five accused were sentenced to death for their involvement in the murder, while Farabi was sentenced to life imprisonment. Farabi appealed against this verdict.
Lawyers argued that Farabi was convicted on the basis of a wrong observation. There are confessional statements of four other convicts, but none of them mentioned Farabi’s name. Even his name did not appear in the testimony of any witness other than the investigation officer. Farabi himself did not give any confessional statement.
In March, extremist Farabi released a video message from jail during Ramadan and deplored the inaction of Khelafat Majlish leader Mamunul Haque, Jamaat leader Golam Parwar and Chormonai Pir’s Islami Andolan Bangladesh leaders, whom he had met in the prison.
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He asked Islamist parties to work for his release and spread his blogs and court statements as books.
Farabi said he was convicted in several cases and will have to serve 39 years in jail.
A former student of Chittagong University and member of the banned Hizb ut-Tahrir, Farabi was arrested after an al-Qaeda offshoot (Ansarullah Bangla Team) started killing secular writers and publishers in 2013.
The killers later emerged as Ansar al-Islam when the Pakistan-based AQIS, or al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent, was formed in 2014. AQIS members killed Avijit Roy and some of his followers. Farabi was arrested again for threatening Avijit and his family with dire consequences on Facebook for several years.
Even though Farabi thought nobody was there to help him come out of jail, jihadi clerics like Jasimuddin Rahmani and Anayetullah Abbasi and Facebook pages and groups run by Qawmi madrasa groups and Chhatra Shibir, and YouTubers like Elias Hossain were working for the release of militants and radical Islamists, terming them Islamic scholars.
Rahmani and dozens of other jihadists have already been granted bail and are actively propagating jihad. Meanwhile, the government is working to withdraw the cases against militants and has maintained its position not to arrest the militants who fled during jailbreaks in August.
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