Bangladesh arrests top Islamist extremist – Man held over bid to attack police station

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DHAKA, July 21, (Agencies): Bangladesh’s elite security force said Thursday it had arrested a top regional head of the homegrown Islamist extremist group blamed for an attack on a Dhaka cafe in which 20 hostages were murdered.

Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) officers stormed a fl at in an apartment building in the industrial town of Tongi, just north of the capital Dhaka, and arrested four members of the Jamayetul Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB). “Among them was Mahmudul Hasan, the southern regional head of the JMB. He is a top militant trainer,” RAB spokesman Mufti Mahmud Khan told reporters.

Police recovered hand-made bombs and bomb-making materials from the house, indicating the militants “were planning to carry out an act of sabotage,” he said. Bangladesh’s government has blamed JMB for the July 1 attack on an upscale cafe in Dhaka’s Gulshan neighbourhood in which 20 hostages, including 18 foreigners, were shot and slaughtered.

The Islamic State group claimed responsibility for the Gulshan attack, releasing photos of the carnage and of the five men who carried out the deadly assault. Bangladeshi authorities rejected the claim, saying international jihadist networks have no presence in the world’s third largest Muslim majority nation. But national police chief Shahidul Hoque said recently that authorities were investigating whether the Gulshan attackers had any international connections.

RAB spokesman Khan said officers were probing whether Hasan and the three other detained JMB operatives, including a medical student, had played a role in the Gulshan attack. “They will be questioned,” he said. Hasan-trained militants were responsible for the murder of a police constable and deadly bomb attack at the nation’s most respected Shiite shrine in Dhaka late last year, he added. Bangladesh has been reeling from a deadly wave of attacks in the last three years.

The government and police say homegrown extremists are responsible for the deaths of some 80 secular activists, foreigners and religious minorities since 2013. Both IS and a branch of al-Qaeda have claimed responsibility for many of the attacks.

Threat
Critics say Hasina’s administration is in denial about the nature of the threat posed by Islamist extremists and accuse her of trying to exploit the attacks to demonise her domestic political opponents. Last month, authorities launched a crackdown on local jihadists, arresting more than 11,000 people, but critics allege the arrests were arbitrary or designed to silence opposition. Bangladesh’s security force arrested four members of Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen (JMB) on Thursday, including a regional leader of the banned group blamed for the Islamist attack on a cafe in Dhaka in which 22 people were killed, mostly foreigners. The Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) raided an apartment on the outskirts of the capital Dhaka and arrested the group’s southern region leader and three other members, including a medical student, said RAB spokesman Mizanur Rahman Bhuiya.

Weapons
“They will be interrogated intensively to understand if they had any connection with the cafe attack,” he told Reuters. A huge quality of ammunition, weapons, bomb-making materials and jihadi books have been recovered from the house, which was used for training recruits, Bhuiya added. Five Bangladesh militants, most from wealthy, liberal families, stormed an upmarket restaurant on July 1 and murdered customers, before they were gunned down.

The majority of victims were foreigners from Italy, Japan, India and the United States, before they were gunned down. The attack, claimed by Islamic State, marked a major escalation in the scale and brutality of violence aimed at forcing strict Islamic rule in Bangladesh, whose 160 million people are mostly Muslim. Bangladesh has faced a series of attacks on liberal bloggers, university teachers and members of religious minorities over the past year.

The government says home-grown militant groups are behind the attacks. The head of a group working on factory safety in Bangladesh for fashion retailers including Inditex and H&M expects brands to actually increase sourcing from the country due to improving building standards despite attacks claimed by Islamist militants. The Accord on Fire and Building Safety was set up by more than 200 mostly European brands, retailers and importers in 2013 to improve safety in Bangladeshi factories after the collapse of the Rana Plaza complex in which more than 1,100 people died.

Accord executive director Rob Wayss said much progress had been made since then, with 65 percent of the safety issues identified at around 1,600 factories already resolved. “There is no other country where the work that the Accord is doing is taking place and where buyers can have the assurances on safety compliance issues that they can have here,” he told Reuters in a interview over Skype from Dhaka. “For many of the brands, Bangladesh is a very important and good supplier base and … it is still their plan to increase the amount and types of production that they have here,” he said, stressing that sourcing decisions rest with the brands.

Bangladesh relies on garments for more than 80 percent of its exports and roughly 4 million jobs. It ranks behind only China as a clothing supplier to developed markets in Europe and the United States. Some people working in the garment industry say they fear for the future of the $28 billion sector after a group of radicalised young Bangladeshis killed about 20 people, including 18 foreigners, in an attack on an upscale Dhaka restaurant.

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