ROUGH CUT (NO REPORTER NARRATION)<br/> <br />STORY: At least 50 people including policemen were injured in Bangladesh on Monday as Islamist activists protested against the prosecution of their leaders on charges stemming from a war of independence 40 years ago, police and witnesses said.<br/> <br />Protesters set off crude explosives and threw bricks at police who tried to disperse them with tear gas, batons and some shots in the air, witnesses said.<br/> <br />Police detained about 20 activists, reporters on the scene said, and the disturbances disrupted traffic on city-center roads. Similar protests broke out in the northern town of Rajshahi, Chittagong in the southeast and several other towns across the country.<br/> <br />Bangladesh became part of Pakistan at the end of British rule in 1947 but it broke away from Pakistan in 1971 after a war between Bangladeshi nationalists, who were backed by India, and Pakistani forces.<br/> <br />Some factions in Bangladesh opposed the break with Pakistan.<br/> <br />A Bangladeshi war crimes tribunal began work in mid-2011 to investigate some of the violence during the nine-month war when up to three million people were killed and thousands of women were raped.<br/> <br />Last week, the tribunal reached its first verdict, sentencing a former member of the Jamaat-e-Islami party and a popular Islamic preacher, Abul Kalam Azad, to death in absentia.
