In a pre-down raid, the security forces on Wednesday unearthed an arms factory, believed to be used by a banned Islamist outfit, in the Bangladesh capital and seized huge arms and explosive from there, according to the police. The members of the elite anti-crime force, Rapid Action Battalion, and the police confiscated the arms and explosives, including 17 grenades, 14 pistols, 90 kilograms of explosives, bomb making circuits, detonators and a dice to manufacture bullets, from eastern Manda area of the city. "The explosives could have blown up many installations and well enough to kill several thousand people," said one official at the Rapid Action Battalion. They arrested one woman named, Suraya Begum, from the tin-roofed hut, where the arms factory was housed, as most of the men working there had fled sensing the presence of the security forces. Bundles of books and leaflets calling the people for Jihad against the existing system of the state and establishing Bangladesh as 'truly an Islamic state' were also recovered from the scene.
The forces launched the joint operation against an Islamist outfit, Jamaatul Mujahideen Bangladesh, widely blamed for the repeated bomb and grenade attacks that killed scores of people in Bangladesh, and arrested more than 200 suspects only in last couple of weeks. They have been trying to capture Shaikh Abdur Rahman and Siddiqul Islam Bangla Bhai, two masterminds of the recent spate of suicide bombings, and destroy their arms dens across the country.
In northern Rajshahi district, the member of the paramilitary Bangladesh Rifles recovered six grenades on Tuesday night.pprehending the presence of trained members of the banned slamist outfit, the law enforcers raided a number of in students' dormitories in the capital to nab the militants. A raid was conducted on Latif Hall of the Dhaka Polytechnic Institute on Tuesday by joint forces comprising members of the Rapid Action Battalion, Armed Police Battalion and Dhaka Metropolitan Police, who cordoned it off for several hours. In another drive, the plainclothes policemen detained four students of Dhaka College from the examination hall on the same day, suspecting them to be militants, but later released them upon the assurance of the college principal.