B'desh Court: ULFA leader Paresh Barua, 13 get death sentence

Chittagong (

), Jan 30: A Chittagong court ordered the

of

leader Paresh Barua and 12 others in connection with an arms smuggling case in 2004. While Barua and the former secretary to the industries ministry Nurul Amin hve been sentenced in absentia, 9 are in jail.

According to an NDTV report, others sentenced to death include Jamaat chief and the then industries minister Motiur Rahman Nizami and Lutfozzaman Babar, the then state to minister for home. All have been charged for smuggling in 10 truckloads of firearms on April 2, 2004.

The firearm heist was a major one as a huge cache of arms was recovered at the jetty of the Chittagong Urea Fertiliser Ltd (CUFL), close to the Karnaphuli river. These firearms were being loaded on 10 trucks to be sent to the Indian separatist outfit ULFA. The cache included 27,020 grenades, 2,000 grenade-launching tubes, 4,930 sophisticated firearms of several types, 840 rocket launchers, 300 rockets, 6,392 magazines and 11.41 million bullets.

Two chargesheets were slapped in connection with the case-one in the arms case and after four months, another in the smuggling case. Barua and Amin are absconding since then.

OneIndia News