By IANS
Dhaka : The family of a Bangladesh Army major convicted for killing the country's founder Sheikh Mujibur Rahman is making emotional appeals for asylum in Canada after the US decided to deport him.
A.K.M. Mohiuddin Ahmed has lost his last appeal to stay on in the US, where he entered on a tourist visa in 1996 and stayed on illegally.
Now his family and friends have appealed to Canada to grant him asylum as the US is set to deport him back to Bangladesh.
He has been declared a fugitive after he was tried in absentia and convicted in 1998 for his part in a military-led coup on Aug 15, 1975. Twenty-eight people, including Mujib, most of his relations and political supporters were killed that morning.
Mohiuddin is one of the many former soldiers, dubbed "killer majors", who is at large after being given safe passage. Some of them were given diplomatic assignments and now live outside Bangladesh.
Mohiuddin's last chance to remain in the US ended late last week when San Francisco's 9th Circuit Court refused to hear his case again.
The State Department has ruled that his trial in Dhaka followed due process, even though the department's most recent report on human rights found the Bangladeshi court system was "plagued by corruption" and hampered by witness tampering, victim intimidation and missing evidence.
The San Francisco court ruled that Mohiuddin "assisted or participated" in the persecution of others for political reasons and said the coup was "an act of terrorism", something viewed gravely in the US.
A Canadian daily newspaper last Tuesday reported that the US authorities were set to deport Mohiuddin soon.
It has been stalled earlier, each time he has filed an appeal for review of the deportation order.
Director of Dhaka's American Centre Jonathan Cebra said: "I cannot admit or deny it."
He said he did not have information when Mohiuddin would be deported, New Age said Friday.
The Canadian newspaper, which it did not name, said the friends and family of Mohiuddin were "desperately appealing to Canada to grant him asylum".
"Please allow my father to come to your country," Sabrina Ahmed, Mohiuddin's daughter, said at a news conference in Ottawa Wednesday.
"I stand by him and I will stand with him until his last breath,' his wife, Hena Mohiuddin, said in an interview.
Son Rouben Ahmed said: "I want Canada to do the right thing. Canada has a humanitarian history. Canada would know this is not right."
They said Mohiuddin had sought asylum in the United States rather than returning to Bangladesh, a country where he believed he could not find justice.