Dhaka: Bangladesh on Saturday smashed a militants den and arrested three suspected Islamists as the murder of a Bangladeshi origin US blogger known for his criticism of religious extremism sparked massive protests.
Elite anti-crime Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) said in a predawn raid at a five-storey building at northeastern port city of Chittagong they arrested three suspected militants and seized 30 grenades and huge quantum of explosives and weapons.
“We have seized 30 grenades ... it appears they [militants] could have made some 300-400 bombs with the explosives we found at the den,” RAB’s commanding officer in Chittagong Lieutenant Colonel Mista Uddin told newsmen in a primary briefing.
He said they carried out the raid on a secret tip off and arrested three suspected militants from the scene and added that the details on the development including the identity of the Islamist outfit would be revealed at a press conference later on Saturday.
This was the second such raid since February 22 when RAB unearthed a militants’ training camp at the rugged Banshkhali area in the Chittagong region and arrested five persons along with huge amount of firearms and training equipment.
But today’s development came two days after machete-wielding suspected radicals hacked to death Bangladeshi origin US national and blogger Avijit Roy and critically wounded his wife as they were returning from a book fair in the capital Dhaka.
A bioengineer and naturalised US citizen Roy also earned a reputation of being a writer while he was killed as he came to Dhaka to join Bangladesh’s annual February or Ekushey Book Fair in memory of 1952 Language Movement martyrs.
Roy was hacked to death at the premier Dhaka University area near the book fair scene on Thursday evening when his wife and fellow blogger Rafida Ahmad Banna was seriously injured as she tried to defend him.
Roy’s family and friends said Islamist radicals had been threatening him in recent weeks because he maintained a blog, “Mukto-mona,” or “Freemind,” that highlighted humanist and rationalist ideas and condemned religious extremism.
“They (Islamists) are behind the murder of my son,” Roy’s octogenarian father famous physicist Ajay Roy earlier told newsmen after coming out of a police station filing a murder case.
Doctors who autopsied the body said professionals appeared to have carried out the murder as they struck three blows “very expertly and with ferocity” on Roy’s head causing him to die from profuse bleeding.
Police said they were investigating the involvement of Ansarullah Bangla Team, an extremist group based in Bangladesh that claimed responsibility on Friday for the murder. In an internet posting months ago they said “It is not possible to kill Avijit at the moment since he lives in the United Sates. But he will be killed when he will come to Dhaka”.
A twitter account in the name of Ansar Bangla 7 described Roy’s murder as an “achievement” saying --- ““Allahu akbar. A great success today here in #Bangladesh. Target is Down” while a series of subsequent tweets called the murder as a punishment for his “crime against Islam”.
Protests were mounting across Bangladesh capital with civil society figures and youngsters staging rallies in the capital Dhaka, while major newspapers carried editorials demanding justice.
This was the second such murder of a writer at the February Book Fair scene since the suspected militants attacked famous Bangladeshi writer and Dhaka University professor Humayun Azad who subsequently died of his wounds in Germany.
The militants later also killed another blogger Rajib Haidar at Dhaka’s Mirpur area in 2013 calling him as an “enemy of Islam”.
The United States earlier condemned the murder in the “strongest terms” calling it “horrific in its brutality and cowardice” while the state department spokesperson Jen Psaki said “this was not just an attack against a person, but a cowardly assault on the universal principles enshrined in Bangladesh’s constitution and the country’s proud tradition of free intellectual and religious discourse”.
British High Commissioner in Dhaka Robert Gibson in a tweet message said “shocked by the savage murder of AvijitRoy as I am by all the violence that has taken place in #Bangladesh in recent months”.
The Centre for Inquiry, a US-based non-profit group Roy wrote for, said it was “shocked and heart-broken” by the murder adding “Dr Roy was a true ally, a courageous and eloquent defender of reason, science, and free expression, in a country where those values have been under heavy attack”.
Media group Reporters Without Borders rated Bangladesh 146th among 180 countries in a ranking of press freedom last year.
But the latest act of suspected militants came as the country witnesses a continued unrest since January 6 when Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) of former prime minister Khaleda Zia launched a violent non-stop nationwide blockade which saw more than 110 people die, mostly from clandestine arson attacks on buses and trucks by suspected blockaders.
Security experts expressed fears the focus of law enforcement agencies on tackling political unrest had created space for extremist elements to reorganise or regroup after years of anti-militancy security clampdown virtually destroyed their networks.
The Brussels-based International Crisis Group (ICG) earlier this month came up with a report saying the extremists and criminal networks could exploit the resulting political void caused by extreme hostility between Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s ruling Awami League and her arch-rival Khaleda Zia’s BNP.
“Violent Islamist factions are already reviving, threatening the secular, democratic order. While jihadi forces see both parties as the main hurdle to the establishment of an Islamic order, the AL and the BNP perceive each other as the main adversary,” the ICG report read.
