On this date in 2015, Bangladesh hanged the former assistant secretary-general of the militant Jamaat-e-Islami party, Mohammad Qamaruzzaman.

He’d been sentenced for crimes against humanity during the 1971 war of independence that separated Bangladesh — the former “East Pakistan” — from Pakistan; his was just one of several high-profile 2010s prosecutions (and the second execution) by a special tribunal to settle scores from that bloody parting.

Jamaat-e-Islami’s party history traces back to the British Raj and versions of it exist in each of Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh. In the 1971 war, that Islamist party was ferociously anti-independence, collaborating with the Pakistani military’s violent attempted suppression of the rebellion; according to Al Jazeera, Qamaruzzaman was convicted of having “headed an armed group that collaborated with the Pakistani army in central Bangladesh in 1971 and was behind the killings of at least 120 unarmed farmers.”

Qamaruzzaman proudly (and also realistically) declined to bend the knee in hopes of an unlikely presidential pardon and swung serene in the rightness and future triumph of his cause.

On this day..

• 1827: Sarah Jones, firm infanticide
• 1775: A robber under the apartments of Joseph Jekyll
• 1730: A Natchez woman tortured to death at New Orleans
• 1947: Louise Peete, Tiger Woman
• 1945: Pvt. Benjamin Hopper
• 1859: The martyrs of Tacubaya
• 1944: Joseph Epstein, Polish Communist French Resistance hero
• 1612: Refried Edward Wightman
• 1705: Captain Thomas Green and two of his crew on the Worcester
• 1554: Thomas Wyatt the Younger, with the Queen's life in his hands
• 2003: Three ferry hijackers
• 1670: Major Thomas Weir, a Puritan with a double life