Detectives have found that a group of militants had been planning a bank heist to raise money for the so-called Bangladesh Jihadi Group, thought to be a common platform of the major outlawed outfits.
The decision to form such a platform came more than a year ago when the leaders of Jama’atul Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB), Harkat-ul Jihad Al Islami Bangladesh (Huji-B) and the Ansarullah Bangla Team held a secret meeting inside a jail. But that decision could not be materiliased because of a shortage of fund.
Detectives first came to know about such a group in October last year. The jihadi group has been molding itself in line with the international terrorist group Islamic State.
In April, nine people were killed when militants tried in vain to rob a bank in Ashulia near Dhaka. Earlier this month, police detained the mastermind of that attempted heist who is also known as a leader of the recently banned outfit Ansarullah. Other robbers have also confessed in police custody that they belonged to that outfit.
“We got such sensational information after arresting nine members of banned outfits Huji-B and Ansarullah in separate drivers in Dhaka’s Sutrapur and Bansaree areas,” said Krishna Pada Roy, acting joint commissioner of police’s Detective Branch (DB), at a media briefing in Dhaka yesterday.
The nine are Kazi Iftekhar Khaled, 28, Fahad, 20, Rahat, 21, Din Islam, 25, Ariful Karim Chowdhury, 33, Nurul Islam, 29, Mawlana Nurullah Kashemi, 58, Delowar Hossain, 55, and Yeasin Arafat, 28.
Iftekhar, 28, a soil science graduate of Dhaka University who runs a printing press, is the operational chief of this nine-member group. Fahad, 20, is a bomb-making expert and his father Nurullah Kashemi, who is now on the run, is the spiritual leader of this group.
Yeasin, Nurul and Din Islam work for a garment factory in Keraniganj near Dhaka. Of them, Nurul leads attacks and Ariful is the private secretary of their leader Kashemi.
In those drives, detectives have also seized 5kg explosives, an amount of bomb-making materials, a modern laboratory, eight bombs, six chocolate bombs, four machetes and Jihadi books.
Krishna Pada said that a DB team first conducted a drive in a garage of a house at Block L of Bansree around 3pm yesterday and arrested Khaled, Fahad, Kayes, Rahat, Din islam, Ariful and Nurul. Then based on information given by them, they picked up the others in a house in Lalmohan street of Sutrapur in Old Dhaka.
During interrogation, the militants said they were planning to rob a number of banks in Dhaka and the northern districts. Krishna, however, did not disclose which banks were part of their plan.
“As of now, we still do not know whether they have links with the blogger-murders. We need to do more investigation for being able to tell more about this,” Krishna said.
Later yesterday, a Dhaka court granted police different durations of remand – ranging from one to four days – for the criminals who were shown arrested in three robbery, explosives and anti-terrorism cases.