A former Marxist guerrilla, Bouya himself was sentenced to 42 years in prison for the 1979 murder of a trucker during a shootout with police.
While he was in pre-trial detention, he noticed that the executioners, recruited from among the prisoners, enjoyed “first class” treatment and were pampered by their fellow prisoners. He then volunteered.
Each time he was executed, he was rewarded with a special meal of beef, chicken and fragrant rice pilaf, plus a few months off his sentence.
During his career, he claims to have hanged 60 convicts, including at least three innocent people according to him.
The prison authorities, for their part, put his record at 26 executions, including those of the soldiers responsible for a coup d’état in 1975 which cost the life of Sheikh Mijibur Rahman, founder of Bangladesh and father of current Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina. .
His services as an executioner having earned him a reduced sentence, he was released last year and published an autobiography, which became a bestseller in Bangladesh.
He describes in detail the way he hanged the condemned and the last moments of some of the most famous, without venturing into the debate for or against the death penalty or the shortcomings of justice in Bangladesh.
He also married a woman 50 years his junior, and caused a sensation on TikTok by posting videos there.
According to police, he felt a sharp pain in his chest on Monday morning at his home in Hemayetpur, a suburb of the capital Dhaka, and died before arriving at the hospital.
According to Amnesty International, more than 2,400 people were awaiting execution in Bangladeshi prisons at the end of 2023, and five have been hanged. The country’s courts handed down more than 248 death sentences in the same year, the third highest figure in the world.
