Bangladesh RAB Arrests Islamists Implicated in Bloggers’ Murder

Dhaka shows will to act against terror by arresting 12 Islamists suspected to be linked to two bloggers’ murder.

Women members of Bangladesh’s Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) stand guard during a rally in Dhaka. (Photo: Reuters)

In another instance of the Sheikh Hasina government’s commitment to crackdown on violent Islamists, Bangladesh’s Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) on Wednesday arrested 12 members of Al Qaeda Indian Sub-continent (AQIS), the organisation responsible for the murder of at least two secularist bloggers over the past few months.

Those arrested include AQIS’ Bangladesh chief Maulana Mainul Islam, a former senior functionary of the banned Harkat-ul-Jihadi Islami, and his advisor Maulana Zafar Amin. The arrests were preceded by night-long raids in Dhaka and the port city of Chittagong. Bangladesh intelligence sources indicated that more arrests were likely as counter-terror operations continue in some parts of Bangladesh. A large cache of weapons, bomb manufacturing accessories, arms training manuals and radical literature was recovered from the hideouts or “community messes” that the RAB raided.

Shocked by the killing of several secularist bloggers over the past eight months, the Sheikh Hasina regime ordered a crackdown on the AQIS, an al-Qaeda affiliate in South Asia, which claimed responsibility for the murder of Avijit Roy, a Bangladeshi-American, and Ananta Bijoy Das, in Dhaka.

HuJI-B Offshoot

Members of the Islamic Constitution Movement, an Islamist party, protest during a rally in Dhaka. (Photo: Reuters)

Sources in the Bangladeshi security establishment said that the AQIS, which is an off-shoot of the HuJI that was directly linked to the al Qaeda after the spectacular September 11, 2001, terror strikes in New York and Washington DC, chose the bloggers as soft targets. “This appears to be in line with the Pakistan army’s 1971 policy of targeting the intelligentsia and other thought leaders,” the source said.

The Bangladesh HuJI, formed in 1992, was banned by Begum Khaleda Zia’s Bangladesh Nationalist Party government in October 2005. Five years before it was proscribed, HuJI-B was involved in the aborted attempt to assassinate Sheikh Hasina. Following the ban and subsequent crackdown, HuJI-B scattered and cloned itself as AQIS while lying low in Chittagong’s hilly terrain bordering Myanmar.

About six months ago, the AQIS shot into prominence when it was named by absconded al Qaeda leader Ayman al Zawahiri, a close associate of the slain Osama bin Laden, in a video in which he called for the overthrow of the Sheikh Hasina government which was described as murtaad – a Muslim who abandons Islam.

In contrast to HuJI-B, the other Bangladeshi terror group Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen (JuMB), whose foot soldiers have been implicated in the October 2, 2014, Burdwan blast in West Bengal, dismantled its network of operatives in Bangladesh and crossed over to Assam and West Bengal.