Canadian High Commissioner in Dhaka Heather Cruden

Canadian High Commissioner in Dhaka Heather Cruden said Canada would not extradite Nur Chowdhury, the alleged assassin of Bangladesh’s founding president, because he could face the death penalty in his home country. Heather Cruden told this to reporters emerging from a meeting with Bangladeshi Foreign Minister Dipu Moni.
“She (the foreign minister) did indeed raise the issue. I have committed to raise it again with my government. Of course, my government has clear policy that we cannot extradite people to countries that have death penalty,” she said in response to question from journalists.
During the meeting, according to a statement issued by the foreign minister’s office, Moni had pressed Cruden to facilitate Canada’s handover of the “self-confessed killer” Chowdhury, a former Bangladeshi military officer who, in 1998, was convicted in absentia in the August 1975 killing of Bangladesh’s first president, Sheik Mujibur Rahman.
In 1998, after a long trial, the court awarded death sentences to 12 people. Of them, five were hanged on 28 January 2010, one died, six are still absconding. Chowdhury, who fled Bangladesh for Canada in 1996, has not been sent back to Bangladesh by Canadian authorities because of the prospect of execution, Canada’s own abolition of capital punishment in 1976 and subsequent court rulings forbidding this country from extraditing individuals in capital cases without first receiving assurances from foreign authorities that the death penalty will not be imposed.
Rahman was shot dead at his compound in Dhaka on Aug. 15, 1975, during a bloody coup known to have been orchestrated by military officers. Several other members of the leader’s family — including his wife and three sons — were also murdered.
Rahman’s daughter, Sheik Hasina Wajed, escaped death in the massacre because she was travelling in Europe at the time. Now she’s Bangladesh’s prime minister, and has vowed to bring those who killed her father and other family members to justice.