Dhaka: A special tribunal in Bangladesh Wednesday handed down the death penalty to Jamaat-e-Islami chief Motiur Rahman Nizami for wartime atrocities during the country's 1971 Liberation War, media reports said.

Nizami, who led the Pakistan Army’s vigilante militia outfit, Al-Badr, to abort Bangladesh's birth, has also been awarded life sentence by the International Crimes Tribunal-1 that found him guilty on eight out of 16 charges levelled against him in a historic trial that began almost four decades after Bangladesh's war of independence, the Daily Star reported.