Bangladesh’s top court has paved the way for the execution of one of the country’s senior Islamist leaders — convicted two years ago of atrocities committed during the country’s 1971 war of independence — by dismissing his final appeal for clemency on Tuesday. Mir Quasem Ali can now only be saved from the noose by a presidential pardon, Bangladeshi newspaper the Daily Star reported. Ali, a former media tycoon who served as a financier for the country’s biggest Islamist party Jamaat-e-Islami, was convicted of war crimes in 2014 by a special tribunal set up by Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina four years earlier.