When Shahjahan Bouya was imprisoned, he had only killed one man. By the time he was released decades later, he had executed dozens. He had become the most active executioner in Bangladesh.
Each time he was executed, he was rewarded with a special meal of beef, chicken and pilaf with fragrant rice, as well as a few months remission from his 42-year sentence. He was released from prison earlier this year.
“Some die and others celebrate,” notes the mustachioed 70-year-old, still full of strength, “that’s the image of the prison.”
In Bangladesh, which according to Amnesty International ranks third in the world in the number of death sentences, prisoners themselves are responsible for executions by hanging.
Shahjahan Bouya, an educated Marxist revolutionary, joined the Sarbahar rebels in the 1970s who attempted to overthrow the then government, believing he had been paid off by neighboring India.
Mr. Bouya was convicted in the 1979 death of a truck driver in a shootout with police.
During the twelve years that the trial lasted, while in prison he noticed the “first class” treatment reserved for the executioners when he saw one of them being massaged by four prisoners.
“An executioner has so much power,” he thought. And he volunteered.
He still remembers his first execution in the late 1980s. He then assisted an executioner and remembered the condemned man, who “calmly and without tears recited a Kalima,” an Islamic creed.
– “Facing death” –
Once a presidential pardon request is rejected, a death row inmate can be hanged at any time. But the executioner is informed several days in advance.
Mr. Bouya then lubricated his rope and then tested the mechanism to open the trap.
The convict’s family was called to say goodbye. Hot water scented with herbs was then brought to wash the prisoner, along with white clothing and the last meal of his choice.
A Muslim religious man came to pray with him for forgiveness of his sins. A minute after midnight, says the executioner, “we handcuffed the prisoner from behind and blindfolded him with a black mask. Then we led him to the gallows, put the noose around his neck and asked him to recite the Kalima.”
“When the prison warden lowered his handkerchief, I pulled the lever,” he explains.
He rarely spoke to the condemned. “What can he feel about death?” he said. “He knows he’s leaving the world.”
– “Someone else would have done the job” –
Prison authorities estimate that Mr. Bouya carried out 26 executions, but he counted 60.
Those convicted in his hands include army officers blamed for the 1975 coup and the assassination of the country’s founding leader, the father of current Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina.
In 2007, he hanged Siddique Islam, alias Bangla Bhai, an Islamist leader of the banned organization Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh, which had carried out a series of nationwide bombings.
The executioner also executed six opposition leaders, including five from the country’s largest Islamist party, who were convicted of war crimes during the 1971 War of Independence.
Human rights activists say Bangladesh’s penal system is deeply flawed, but Bouya rejects their criticism, although he believes at least three of the people he executed were innocent.
“If I hadn’t hung them, someone else would have done the work,” he argues.
– “Never alone” –
Now free, Shahjahan Bouya rents a room in a modest neighborhood of Keraniganj, a suburb of Dhaka.
He proudly shows a small piece of the rope on which so many convicts got stuck. “Some believe he has extraordinary powers,” he says.
In prison, he shared his cell with about twenty inmates and the lights were constantly on. When he woke up at night, there would be some people talking or playing cards.
“We talked, I was never alone,” he says, now “I leave a dim light on because I can’t sleep in the dark.”
In prison he gave up Marxism and turned to Islam. He dreams of a pilgrimage to the holy city of Mecca in Saudi Arabia.
“I only have one small wish: to perform the Umrah (small pilgrimage, editor’s note) before I die,” he admits, “the rest depends on what Allah gives.”