In another instance of the Sheikh Hasina government’s commitment to crackdown on violent Islamists, Bangladesh’s Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) on Wednesday arrested 12 members of Al Qaeda Indian Sub-continent (AQIS), the organisation responsible for the murder of at least two secularist bloggers over the past few months.
Those arrested include AQIS’ Bangladesh chief Maulana Mainul Islam, a former senior functionary of the banned Harkat-ul-Jihadi Islami, and his advisor Maulana Zafar Amin. The arrests were preceded by night-long raids in Dhaka and the port city of Chittagong. Bangladesh intelligence sources indicated that more arrests were likely as counter-terror operations continue in some parts of Bangladesh. A large cache of weapons, bomb manufacturing accessories, arms training manuals and radical literature was recovered from the hideouts or “community messes” that the RAB raided.
Shocked by the killing of several secularist bloggers over the past eight months, the Sheikh Hasina regime ordered a crackdown on the AQIS, an al-Qaeda affiliate in South Asia, which claimed responsibility for the murder of Avijit Roy, a Bangladeshi-American, and Ananta Bijoy Das, in Dhaka.