Delwar Hossain Sayeedi

:: Bangladesh’s top court Monday upheld a life sentence for a renowned Jamaat-e-Islami preacher convicted of war crimes, rejecting calls for him to be hanged.

The Supreme Court stood by its 2014 decision to jail Delwar Hossain Sayeedi for life over atrocities committed during Bangladesh’s 1971 war of independence against Pakistan.

Sayeedi’s lawyers wanted the prominent member of the religious party acquitted while government attorneys sought capital punishment for the 77-year-old cleric.

“The court rejected the review appeals by both sides,” Sayeedi’s lawyer Tanvir Al Amin told AFP.

Five Jamaat leaders, including top leader Motiur Rahman Nizami, have been executed for their part in “bloody crimes during the war of independence.”

Sayeedi was sentenced to death in 2013 by a war crimes tribunal, despite criticism by human rights groups that the proceedings failed to meet international norms.

The verdict triggered some of the worst political violence in years in the Muslim-majority nation, with scores left dead as tens of thousands of protesters clashed with police.

Support for the preacher — whose sermons could draw hundreds of thousands — swelled recently, sources said.

The Supreme Court in 2014 commuted the death sentence to life imprisonment, angering secularists who had fought for decades for top Jamaat members to be punished for war crimes.

Sayeedi and other Jamaat leaders were implicated in the murder, rape and torture of Hindus and pro-independence Bangladeshis, seeking a secular nation free from Pakistani rule.

The court decision in Sayeedi’s case comes as Bangladesh grapples with a rise in violence.

The secular government of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina has ordered a crackdown on homegrown militants after a series of bloody attacks.