Three More Islamist Terrorists With Bangladeshi Links Nabbed In Assam

Three Islamist terrorists affiliated to proscribed Bangladeshi outfit Ansarullah Bangla Team (ABT), a front of al Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent (aQIS), were nabbed from the western Assam district of Dhubri adjoining Bangladesh, Monday (24 April) evening. 

With this, the number of ABT terrorists arrested by the Assam Police stands at 56. The state police have so far busted nine modules of the ABT and aQIS. 

According to top Assam Police officers, sustained interrogation of the ABT terrorists who were arrested earlier led to Monday’s arrest of the three. 

“After many rounds of interrogations, we could extract some information about the existence of these ABT radicals in Dhubri. But the information was not very precise and we had to work on it through our sources to finally zero in on these three,” a senior officer told Swarajya. 

The three arrested are Shafiqul Islam who lives in Bagulamari area of Dhuri, Muzahidul Mondal from Sastarghat Part-ll and Badshah Sheikh from Takimari. All three are Bengali-speaking Muslims and descendants of illegal migrants from Bangladesh. 

Police say the three have routed substantial sums of money to other ABT operatives in the state. The police suspect that the three have strong links with ABT terrorists hiding in other states of the country. 

Assam has, thanks to patronage and protection given to illegal Muslim migrants from Bangladesh by successive Congress regimes in the state, become a hotbed of Islamist terror activities. 

The ABT, banned by Bangladesh government in May 2015, also has strong links with the radical Islamic Chhatra Shibir, the student wing of the Jamaat-e-Islami party of Bangladesh.

The Shibir is responsible for a number of terror acts in Bangladesh, including that of the murders of academics, liberals, bloggers and others. 

Following a crackdown on Islamist radicals by the Sheikh Hasina government in Bangladesh, a huge number of Islamic radicals have taken refuge in India by sneaking through the porous international border. 

These Islamist radicals have regrouped and established modules in Assam, Bengal and other parts of India, and have become conduits for Muslim terror outfits in other parts of the world as well as Pakistan’s ISI.