A Bangladeshi Islamist party leader was sentenced to death on Thursday over abuses carried out during the country's independence war, triggering riots that killed at least 30 people, Reuters reported.

Delwar Hossain Sayedee, 73, vice-president of the Jamaat-e-Islami party, was found guilty by Bangladesh's war crimes tribunal of mass killing, rape, arson, looting and forcing minority Hindus to convert to Islam during the 1971 war of separation from Pakistan, lawyers and tribunal officials said.

After he was convicted and sentenced, police clashed with activists from Sayedee's party and violence raged in more than a dozen areas around the country, police, witnesses and media reports said.

At least three policemen were among the dead and around 300 were wounded, they added. Protesters, who said the verdict was politically motivated, set fire to a Hindu temple and several houses in southern Noakhali region, reporters said. In the southeastern region of Cox's Bazar, they attacked a police camp, killing one.

Two policemen were killed when Islamists stormed a police station at Sundarganj in northern Gaibandha district, police said.

In the capital, authorities deployed extra police and paramilitary soldiers, a Home Ministry official told reporters.