Advocate Khandokar Mahbub was the chief prosecutor of the first war crimes trials in Bangladesh, which began in 1973 but were halted two years later. In an exclusive interview, he told Pinaki Roy that the new tribunal could struggle to find the evidence it needs to secure prosecutions 40 years on.

Commenting on the newly announced war crimes tribunal, Mahbub told The Samosa he wanted the war criminals punished in accordance with the law, but warned that evidence had naturally vanished 40 years on from the crimes, which were committed during Bangladesh’s liberation war in 1971.

“It will be hard to prove many cases,” said Mahbub, who is now president of the country’s Supreme Court Lawyers Association. He said that evidence still exists against many liberation war collaborators for abducting intellectuals who were later found dead.

“But no-one saw the collaborators kill the intellectuals or innocent. There is no such evidence,” he explained.

“According to the penal code, we could prove by legal evidence the abduction of the victims. So under the penal code they can only be convicted for abduction during the liberation war, not for killing.”

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Putting Bangladesh's war criminals on trial was among the main election pledges of Sheikh Hasina’s Awami League government.

Mahbub stood unsuccessfully for the opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) in the 2008 election, when it campaigned in alliance with Jamaat-e-Islami, an Islamist party that opposed the liberation war in 1971 and has been accused of complicity in Pakistani war crimes.

“We are apprehensive that in the name of war criminals there is a chance of political retaliation,” he told The Samosa, adding that any tribunal the government forms must be under the supervision of the United Nations.

The government, since coming to power in January 2009, has taken a number of steps to put Bangladeshis in the dock on charges of mass murder, rape, arson, looting and abetting the Pakistani occupation forces during the liberation war.

The first war crimes tribunal was established in 1973. Mahbub said the government tried a few hundred collaborators, but independence leader Sheikh Mujibur Rahman granted a general amnesty to all collaborators except those accused of murder, rape and arson.

“If the principal offender is known and they have been released, offenders can not be and should not be punished,” he said, adding that the Pakistani soldiers who committed the worst atrocities were released.

The original war crimes tribunal was held under the Collaborators Act 1972. Later Sheikh Mujibur Rahman passed the International War Crime Tribunal Act 1973, but he was killed on August 15th 1975 before trials could commence.