(Eight to ten armed terrorists attacked a bakery in the diplomatic zone of Dhaka, Bangladesh on Friday night. The wave of violence in the country over the past months has killed rationalists, bloggers, activists, and members of minorities. This article has been republished in light of the attack.)
The Singapore home ministry announced on May 3 that it had arrested eight Bangladeshi construction and marine industry workers on suspicion of being part of an Islamic State (IS) affiliate in their home country. According to the evidence collected from the suspects, it is reported that they had plans to “overthrow the democratically elected government through the use of force, establish an Islamic state in Bangladesh and bring it under IS’ self-declared caliphate.”
This is the second such arrest in Singapore and it may be recalled that in late 2015 a group of 26 Bangladeshi workers were arrested and deported for engaging in jihad-related activities. This was the first such arrest of foreign workers in the island-state and investigations revealed that the men were part of a secret religious Islamic group that supported the ideology of the al Qaeda and the IS.
It is understood that the group had been meeting secretly since 2013 in Singapore and planning attacks back home. It is instructive that it took almost two years plus for the security agencies to identify and apprehend the IS sympathisers and deport them back to Bangladesh. Construction workers are housed in spartan camps and far removed from their families and any other social contact. Consequently, they have been seen as fertile sites for silent radicalisation and the Bangladeshi worker has emerged as someone more susceptible to such indoctrination.