Dhaka – The government has issued the order for execution of Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami leader Mir Quasem Ali, who is convicted of crimes committed during Bangladesh’s 1971 war of liberation from Pakistan, officials said on Saturday.

The executive order for execution reached Kahsimpur jail at around 5pm, said Nashir Ahmed, an officer at the jail.

Ahead of the execution, the government deployed additional security forces in and around the jail as the Home Minister Asaduzzaman Khan Kamal said the convicted war criminal will be executed any time on Saturday.

Earlier, a 45-member team of Mir Quasem’s family met the convict at the jail as the prisons authorities allowed them to be there by 3.30 pm.

Senior jail officials and members of the other related departments enter the jail to see the preparation for the execution.

Bangladesh’s highest court on Tuesday rejected a final appeal by Quasem against the death sentence he had been handed for crimes committed during the war.

A five-member panel of Supreme Court judges, headed by Chief Justice Surendra Kumar Sinha, upheld the death sentence for Mir Quasem Ali, 64, a leader of Bangladesh’s Jamaat-e-Islami party.

Ali received the death sentence for crimes including the abduction, killing and dumping bodies of several people in a river in a south-eastern district of Bangladesh.

He was also convicted of several other crimes against humanity that took place during the 1971 conflict.

He was sentenced to death in November 2014 by a special war crimes tribunal for crimes against humanity committed during the nine-month war.