BANGLADESH. LAWYERS APPEAL DEATH CONVICTION, CITING NAME MIX-UP

a Bangladeshi with the same nickname as a murder suspect was mistakenly tried and sentenced to death for a crime he did not commit, his lawyers told a court. The lawyers launched a petition in the High Court asking for Shah Alam Babu to be acquitted due to the alleged mix-up.
"We have petitioned the court for him to be freed on the grounds that somehow one person was accused but another person was summoned to court and tried for the crime," said lawyer Elina Khan of the Society for the Enforcement of Human Rights.
Both men share the same nickname "Babu". The word means baby or small boy in Bengali and is commonly used.
"It is not clear how this situation came to be but it is true that they both have the same name. We have investigated the case and are convinced that there has been a miscarriage of justice," she added.
The victim's widow, Rokeya, said the man tried in the case was not the man she had accused.
"I told the judge that they were sentencing an innocent man to death while the real killer of my husband was roaming freely in the city," she said.
Rokeya's husband Gazi Liaquat Hossain was shot dead in March 1998 after leaving his house in the capital Dhaka.
She said she registered a case with police accusing a man named Sundar Babu on the basis of eyewitness accounts of the killing. But when the trial began she discovered that another man, Shah Alam Babu, was in the dock. He was convicted and given the death penalty by a court in Dhaka in August 2004.