By David Cronin

Those posters still haunt me. ‘Wanted for Murder’, they proclaimed in heavy type above a stony-faced Margaret Thatcher. It was 1981; I was 10 years old. Young men were starving themselves to death 70 miles away from my sleepy hometown in north Dublin. There were black flags everywhere; I was fascinated by how they would proliferate but also a little frightened.

Advocate Khandokar Mahbub was the chief prosecutor of the first war crimes trials in Bangladesh, which began in 1973 but were halted two years later. In an exclusive interview, he told Pinaki Roy that the new tribunal could struggle to find the evidence it needs to secure prosecutions 40 years on.