NEW DELHI , Feb 2026 : Two anti-India terror accused are among three ex-convicts who won the Bangladesh polls on Friday.
Three Bangladeshi leaders have suddenly found themselves to be very lucky. Two of them are from Tarique Rahman’s Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), which won the first national election since the fall of former prime minister Sheikh Hasina, and one from the Jamaat-e-Islami, which lost.
All three had been living with serious charges including the ultimate one – the death penalty – before Muhammad Yunus returned from the US, following Hasina’s departure for India to live in exile. Yunus then cleared their names of all charges.
The two BNP leaders, Lutfozzaman Babar and Abdus Salam Pintu, and ATM Azharul Islam from the Jamaat-e-Islami are now headed to the new parliament of the small nation that had been in a tense situation in its ties with neighbouring India.
In December 2024, a Bangladesh high court acquitted Tarique Rahman, Lutfozzaman Babar and others convicted in two cases linked to a grenade attack on August 21, 2004 that targeted Sheikh Hasina. While she escaped narrowly, 24 people were killed.
Lutfozzaman Babar won the election to his nearest rival by 1.6 lakh votes.
His party colleague, Abdus Salam Pintu, is more problematic from India’s perspective. A year after Babar was acquitted in the grenade attack case, Abdus Salam Pintu also got relief when the charges against him were cleared.
But that’s not all. Pintu had been accused of backing Pakistan’s terror group Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami (Huji) that was behind attacks in India, including the blasts on a court premises in Uttar Pradesh’s Varanasi in 2006, Ajmer Sharif Dargah in 2007, and Delhi in 2011.
Pintu won by at least two lakh votes.
Picture credit social media
