Five Islamist extremists who murdered a Japanese farmer in a drive-by shooting in 2015 were sentenced to death by a Bangladeshi court Tuesday.

The order for the five members of the Jamayetul Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB) to hang was handed down by a judge after finding them guilty of murdering Kunio Hoshi in October 2015.

Judge Naresh Sarker said the five had murdered Hoshi as part of a ‘campaign to destabilise the country and smear its image’.

‘It was a premeditated murder,’ the judge told the courtroom in the northern city of Rangpur as he handed down his sentence.

Four of the men were in the court amid heavy security but one of the defendants was sentenced in absentia.

The 66-year-old Hoshi was shot dead by a gunman riding on the back of a motorbike on a dirt road where he was working on a project to grow grass for cattle.

Among those to be sentenced was Masud Rana, the JMB's 24-year-old area chief, who prosecutors say fired the fatal shot at Hoshi, close to his farm near Rangpur.

The chief prosecutor Abdul Malek said two other people who had helped plan the attack, including the alleged mastermind Saddam Hossain, had already been killed in shootouts with police.

‘They recced Hoshi's home and his movements for days,’ Malek told AFP.

Friends of Hoshi revealed after his death that he had converted to Islam but Malek said the attackers were not aware that he was Muslim.

Hoshi's killing came just days after the murder of an Italian aid worker in the capital Dhaka, one of a string of attacks to be claimed by the Islamic State group.

Although both IS and a branch of Al-Qaeda have claimed responsibility for many of the attacks, the government insists the JMB are to blame for most of them and denies that international jihadist networks have a presence in Bangladesh.

Authorities have also blamed the JMB for the killing of 20 hostages, including seven Japanese nationals, during a siege at an upscale cafe in Dhaka in July last year.

The killings of foreigners such as Hoshi have been a major blow to the international image of Bangladesh, which has been trying to attract foreign investment to fuel its economic growth.

Work on Japanese-funded infrastructure projects such as coal-fired power plants and a metro system in Dhaka were temporarily halted after the attack on the cafe last year.

Analysts say Islamist militants pose a growing danger in conservative Bangladesh, and a long-running political crisis has radicalised opponents of the government.

There was no immediate reaction from the Japanese embassy to Tuesday's judgement, but the prosecutor said that embassy officials have been following the case closely.

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