Anti-liberation forces, enraged that war criminals are being tried, convicted and executed, are murdering foreign nationals in the country to cast the government in a bad light, according to a secret report by one of the country’s intelligence agencies.
The intelligence report submitted to the Ministry of Home Affairs yesterday said the murder of two foreigners in the last six days were not isolated incidents and that anti-liberation forces had been spurred into activity after the execution of convicted war criminals began.
A separate law enforcement agency probe claims it has found evidence that the family of a convicted war criminal was behind the Tavella murder.
Unidentified assailants gunned down Italian citizen Cesare Tavella on September 28 and shot dead Japanese citizen Kunio Hoshi last Saturday.
Claims of Islamic State group (IS) involvement in the murders have been rejected as baseless by the home minister.
“IS is not behind these murders … a vested group is seeking to create anarchy in the country. They are conducting these killings but we will track them down and bring them to justice,” Home Minster Asaduzzaman Khan Kamal said.
“The killings took place just as the trials of two war criminals were concluded. It must be investigated whether or not the killings were meant to create obstacles for the trial process,” the minister added.
“We have evidence in hand and our investigators are following the leads. The culprits will be punished,” Asaduzzaman Khan said.
A ministry official, quoting the report, said: “An anti-government power that has lost its political strength and dislikes the government’s successes is instigating this from behind the scenes.”
“There is no evidence that IS is active in Bangladesh. The actual killers are spreading misleading information to derail the investigation,” the official, who asked not to be named, said.
The official told the Dhaka Tribune that according to the report, the group was hiring professional hitmen to carry out the murders.
Foreigners across the country will require protection, not just those in the diplomatic zone or other parts of the capital, according to the report.
Moreover, law enforcers investigating the Tavella murder yesterday said they had found evidence of the involvement of a war criminal’s relatives in the slaying of the Italian aid worker.
Investigators said an analysis of communications records had yielded clues pointing to their involvement in the murder. The war criminal whose relatives are implicated in the killing had been known as a criminal godfather.
Intelligence officials also said they had information that a member of an anti-government political party had met a number of times with the Australian embassy just before the Australian government issued a travel warning about Bangladesh.
Intelligence officials are trying to determine whether the meetings with the political leader were connected to the travel alert.
