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B'desh hunts for top fugitive Islamist leader
 SYLHET, Bangladesh - Bangladeshi security forces laid siege overnight to a house in a northeastern town, where the leader of a militant Islamist group was believed to be hiding up, officials and witnesses said on Wednesday.
Some 500 members of an elite police force had surrounded the two-storeyed lair house in Sylhet town where Shayek Abdur Rahman, supreme leader of the Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen group, and his henchmen associates were believed to be holed up. Shayeks group and another radical Islamist organisation, the Jagrata Muslim Janata Bangladesh, have been blamed for a wave of bombings in the impoverished nation since August that have killed 30 people and wounded 150.
Police said security forces might eventually storm the house, in the towns Tilagarh area, some 400 km (240 miles) from the capital Dhaka, if the militants did not give themselves up. We are trying to persuade them to come out. But they seem adamant, said an officer of the Rapid Action Battalion force. A Reuters reporter at the scene said the police had made repeated announcements over a loudspeaker, urging the militants to surrender.
"Hokay, come out witcher mitts in da air!"
"You won't hurt us, will you?"
"Pshaw! We'll just go for a midnight stroll. Say, you boys have a shutter gun?"
"Nutz to dat, coppers!" |
Hundreds of people believed to be members of the Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen and the Jagrata Muslim Janata Bangladesh have been detained since the bombings, but Shayek and Jagrata Janata chief Bangla Bhai remain at large. The two groups are fighting for introduction of Islamic sharia law in Bangladesh, a mainly Muslim democracy.
| Identify the joke in that last sentence. |
Posted by: Steve White 2006-03-01 |
