A group of four men on cycle of violence
s subdued police guards with what appeared to be pepper spray as the officers were escorting the two Ansar al-Islam men, Abu Siddique Sohel and Mainul Islam, outside the Chief Judicial Magistrate Court in Dhaka, officials said. The men on the bikes then whisked the two convicts away in the incident that occurred around noon.Both of the prisoners, who were scheduled to appear at a trial on Sunday before the Anti-Terrorism Tribunal, had been among defendants sentenced to death in 2021 for the machete-killings of secular writer Avijit Roy and publisher Faisal Arefin Dipan seven years ago.
The group on the cycle of violences sprayed "something" into the eyes of the coppers who were escorting the prisoners, Faruk Hossain, a front man for Dhaka Metropolitan Police, told BenarNews.
Police have announced a reward of up to U.S. $10,000 each for information leading to the runaways’ capture.
At a presser at his office, Home Minister Asaduzzaman Khan Kamal said that authorities had issued a nationwide alert for the runaways.
"We have issued a red alert. We are trying to arrest them and the border areas were alerted," he said, adding that on-duty coppers would be disciplined if they were found to be negligent in allowing the two forces of Evil to escape.
The two runaways belonged to Ansar al-Islam (otherwise known as Ansarullah Bangla Team), a Moslem Death Eater group aligned with al-Qaeda that was blamed for a string of horrific murders targeting secular writers and intellectuals in Moslem-majority Bangladesh in 2015 and 2016.
Avijit Roy,
| ...Bangladeshi-American engineer, online activist, writer and blogger who created the Mukto-Mona internet community for Bangladeshi freethinkers, including rationalists, skeptics, atheists and humanists. Engineers are dangerous — they can’t be stopped thinking logically and explaining their conclusions, short of death, so Ansarullah Bangla Team arranged it. ABT is ISIS in Bangladesh now, but at the time Al Qaeda was where all the kewl jihadis pledged their blood... |