The Foreign Ministry has asked Turkey's ambassador to Bangladesh to report to Ankara for consultations in the aftermath of the hanging of a senior Jamaat-e-Islami party leader in the Bangladeshi capital Dhaka, an unnamed diplomatic source said Thursday.
Motiur Rahman Nizami, the leader of Jamaat-e-Islami, was hanged at a Dhaka jail late Tuesday for the massacre of intellectuals during the 1971 independence war with Pakistan.
According to the diplomatic source, who spoke on condition of anonymity due to restrictions on speaking with the media, Ambassador Devrim Öztürk is expected to arrive in Ankara on Thursday. On Wednesday, the Foreign Ministry had also strongly condemned the execution of Nizami in a written statement, saying it did not believe that "Nizami deserved such a punishment."
It said that Turkey, which has abolished capital punishment, feared that the use of such methods risked creating "rancor and hatred between our Bangladeshi brothers." President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan strongly condemned Nizami's execution. In a speech in Ankara Thursday he said his country had recalled its ambassador from Bangladesh in protest.
Erdoğan also lashed out at Europe for not speaking out against the execution. "Weren't you against executions?" Erdoğan said. "There was no noise because the person who was executed was a Muslim."
