Family of death row war criminal M Kamaruzzaman entered the Dhaka Central Jail to meet him on Saturday.

Twenty-one members of his family went to the jail by three microbuses at about 4:10pm.

The prison authorities on Saturday asked the Jamaat-e-Islami leader’s family to meet him at the Jail.  

The family members have been asked to meet the Jamaat’s assistant secretary general at the jail, where he has been kept, between 4:00 and 5:00pm, Shishir Manir, one of the his counsel, told NTV Online.

The authorities on Saturday moved to hang a top Jamaat leader for overseeing a massacre during the nation's 1971 independence war, after he refused to seek clemency from the president.

Kamaruzzaman, the third most senior figure in the Jamaat-e-Islami party, was originally expected to be hanged in the early hours of Saturday morning, but the execution was postponed at the last minute.

No official reason was given for the delay, but junior home minister Asaduzzaman Khan told reporters the 62-year-old was now set to be hanged in the capital's main jail on Saturday.

‘The hanging of Kamaruzzaman... will take place today (Saturday),’ the state minister said.

On Friday, security was stepped up outside the jail where Kamaruzzaman was being held, police said.

Two magistrates visited him in prison to find out whether he would seek clemency from President Abdul Hamid, but the pair made no comment following the visit.

Khan, however, said the authorities had decided Kamaruzzaman would not be granted any more time to seek mercy.

‘No, he won't be given anymore time,’ the minister told reporters.

The move to execute him comes after the country's highest court rejected Kamaruzzaman's final legal appeal on Monday, upholding the original death sentence handed down to him by a controversial domestic war crimes court in May 2013.

Kamaruzzaman was convicted of abduction, torture and mass murder including a slaughter in a remote northern hamlet that has since become known as the ‘Village of Widows’.

The conviction confirmed allegations that Kamaruzzaman was one of the chief organisers of a pro-Pakistan militia that killed thousands of people.

The conf