Bangladesh finds “missing youths” to have joined new militant outfit


PTI | Dhaka | Updated: 06-10-2022 19:23 IST | Created: 06-10-2022 19:23 IST
Bangladesh finds “missing youths” to have joined new militant outfit
  • Country:
  • Bangladesh

Bangladesh's elite anti-crime Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) on Thursday said several youths who recently went "missing" have fled their homes to join a new militant outfit that recruits operatives from other outlawed Islamist groups.

RAB media and legal wing chief Commander Khondkar Al Moin said it was determined that four out of seven persons arrested in a series of overnight raids went missing from their home in central Comilla district to join Jama'atul Ansar Fil Hindal Sharqiya -- an outfit so far unknown.

"We have seized from them literature describing the outfit's work procedures, ideology, and guidelines to prepare explosives," said Al Moin at a press conference where the seven arrestees were produced briefly.

He said the outfit was formed in 2017 and recruited people from other known outfits like Ansar Al Islam and Jamaatul Mujahid Bangladesh (JMB) as well as Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami (HuHI).

The RAB official said the new outfit provided their recruits systematic physical and organisational training in remote shoals in coastal Bhola and Patuakhali districts of southwestern Bangladesh alongside lessons to operate in disguise under different professions.

The press conference was also joined by another youth who too had fled his home to join the outfit but returned within days realising "this is a wrong path".

"I urge everybody not to make the wrong thing that I did . . . one must understand what he is doing before taking any such decision," said Shartaz Islam Niloy, who had fled his home in southwestern Patuakhali at the instigation of a cousin to join the outfit.

The family later informed RAB about his return and Niloy was now in the family's custody.

RAB, which draws personnel from the army, navy, and air force alongside regular police, said one of their units arrested seven youths on Tuesday night from Narayanganj and Munshiganj on the outskirts of Dhaka, as well as from northern Mymensingh district.

The seven were aged between 19 and 33 with one of them being a scientific officer at a government office while others included a madrasah teacher, a computer service provider, a university-level student, and a storekeeper.

''We are not complacent with our actions and we never refute the possibility of any (further) militant attack and our intelligence wing is constantly working," Moin said, adding that right now the elite agency did not have any information about militant attack plots.

Bangladesh suffered the deadliest terror attack on July 1 in 2016 when operatives of a reconstituted outfit called Neo-JMB attacked a western-style cafe in Dhaka, killing 22 people -- 17 of them being foreigners including an Indian girl.

The subsequent years saw a massive nationwide anti-militancy crackdown leading to the deaths or arrests of dozens of suspected Islamists.

(This story has not been edited by Devdiscourse staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)

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