Four members of a banned radical group in Bangladesh were arrested

 

A leader and three members of a banned radical group in Bangladesh were arrested with bomb-making materials and were planning to commit sabotage in parts of the country, security officials said on Thursday.

The Jumatul Mujahedeen Bangladesh waged a violent campaign demanding Shariah law and created a large support network before being banned in 2005.

Its members who are on bail or outside jail are now trying to regroup, said Mufti Mahmud Khan, a spokesman for the elite anti-crime Rapid Action Battalion that made the latest arrests.

The group’s current leader, Abdul Baten, and his associate Monir Mollah were arrested at a bus station in Dhaka, Khan said, and information from them led security officials to a railway station where they arrested Golam Kibria and Mollah Roman, who were travelling to Dhaka from Chittagong.

“We arrested them from Kamlapur Railway Station,” Khan said. The battalion seized firebombs, explosives and other bomb-making materials the four had in their possession, but Khan did not give details on the acts of sabotage the men were suspected of planning. The men were produced before journalists at a news briefing on Thursday but little other information was disclosed about them.

JMB was founded in 1998 by Shaikh Abdur Rahman, a religious teacher educated in Saudi Arabia. It became known in 2001 when it engaged in conflict with an extremist communist group in Dinajpur in northern Bangladesh.

On Aug. 17, 2005, it exploded about 500 homemade bombs at nearly 300 locations almost simultaneously across the country as part of a campaign demanding the introduction of Shariah law.