DHAKA, Oct. 29 -- Bangladesh's largest Islamist party on Wednesday called 72-hour countrywide strike in protest of the court verdict that awarded its chief death penalty for war crimes.

Shortly after the International Crimes Tribunal (ICT)-1 in capital Dhaka pronounced the verdict on a crime against humanity, awarding death sentence to the Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islmai party's Ameer (President) Nizami, it called a countrywide strike from 6:00 a.m. Thursday to 6:00 a.m. Friday and 6:00 a.m. Sunday to 6:00 a.m. Monday.

Jamaat made the announcement in a statement in which it rejected the verdict against Nizami.

In the statement, Jamaat also claimed that the government has filed ill motivated baseless cases against its top leaders in order to make the party leaderless.

"Charges which have been brought against Nizami are totally false, fabricated and politically motivated," it said.

The three-member ICT panel, however, explained the 16 charges leveled against the accused 71-year-old Jamaat chief. The panel read the 204- page verdict at a jam-packed court room in the presence of a huge crowd of people particularly journalists and lawyers amid tightened security measures in and around the tribunal.

Nizami was indicted in 2012 with 16 charges of crimes against humanity,including looting, mass killings, arson, rape and forcefully converting people into Muslims during the war.

The indictment order, in a brief profile of the accused, said Nizami was a key organizer of the Al-Badr, an auxiliary force of then Pakistani army which allegedly planned and executed the killing of Bangalee intellectuals at the end of the Liberation War in 1971.