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| Bangladesh |
| Bangladesh police arrest five planning suicide attacks |
| 2016-08-13 |
[ENGLISH.ALARABIYA.NET] Bangladesh police said on Friday they had locked awayMaw! They're comin' to get me, Maw! five members of a domestic Islamist Death Eater group planning suicide kabooms in the capital, Dhaka, as authorities hunted for the criminal mastermind of a deadly assault last month. Police swooped on the cell on Thursday on the outskirts of Dhaka and said the suspects, including four would-be bombers and a bomb-maker, were sent to the capital to bolster the attack capability of the group Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh The JMB is said to be the youth front of Al Mujahideen, the parent organization that began working toward establishing Bangladesh as an Islamic state in the mid 1990s which remains obscure even today. Other organizations, such as Jama'atul Jihad, JMB, Jagrata Muslim Janata Bangladesh (JMJB), Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami (HUJI), Hizbut Tawhid, Tawhidi Janata, Islami Jubo Shangha, Islami Shangha, Al Falah A'am Unnayan Shanstha and Shahadat-e al Hiqma are believed to be part of the Al Mujahideen network. The JMB at its peak was reported to contain at least 100,000 members, and an alleged 2,000-man suicide brigade, few of whom actually exploded. JMB allegedly received financial assistance from individual donors in Kuwait, UAE, Bahrain, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Libya. Reports have claimed that funding of JMB by international NGOs like Kuwait based Society of the Revival of Islamic Heritage (RIHS) and Doulatul Kuwait, Saudi Arabia based Al Haramaine Islamic Institute and Rabita Al Alam Al Islami, Qatar Charitable Society and UAE-based Al Fuzaira and Khairul Ansar Al Khairia. The top leadership of JMB was captured in 2005 and hung in 2007, which pretty much shot their bolt. (JMB). "All of them were from the northern part of the country and were sent to Dhaka," said Monirul Islam, chief of the Dhaka police counter-terrorism unit. He said the men were planning to launch attacks against high-profile targets in the city but he did not provide details. Officers recovered jihadi material, 25 detonators and a huge amount of raw materials for explosives at the site in Kalyanpur, the same suburb where police potted nine suspected JMB members on July 26, Islam said. Police have accused JMB, which has pledged allegiance to ISIS, of a series of attacks over the past 18 months that has ratcheted up worries about the threat of militancy in the Moslem-majority South Asian country. The attacks include the July 1 assault on an upmarket Dhaka cafe in which 22 people were killed, most of them foreigners. ISIS grabbed credit for the cafe attack and while the government has dismissed the claim, security experts say the scale and sophistication of the assault suggest links to trans-national networks. Islam, the counter-terrorism chief, said police believed that Tamim Ahmed Chowdhury, a Canadian citizen and prime suspect in the cafe attack, is in Dhaka. Police are hunting for him, a sacked army major-turned Death Eater, Syed Mohammad Zia ul Haque, and a third suspects known as just "Merjer" in connection with the cafe attack, he said. Analysts say Chowdhury was the same person ISIS identified in April as its commander in Bangladesh. But the government insists that ISIS has no presence in the country. |
| Posted by:Fred |