Mohammad Javed, left, an explosives expert with the Islamist group Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB), was killed yesterday when he detonated a device while security forces searched for weapons in one of the group’s hideouts.
Reuters, AFP
Dhaka
The leader of the military wing of a banned Islamist militant group in Bangladesh was killed when a grenade exploded while he was in police custody early yesterday, hours after he was arrested in
possession of weapons, police said.
Mohammad Javed, the 26-year-old chief of the military wing of Jamaat-ul Mujahideen, was arrested on Monday night along with four other members of the group in the port city of Chittagong.
Senior police official Babul Akter said Javed was killed while he was helping police recover more weapons in Chittagong.
“The grenade exploded when the team was trying to recover it from a drain,” Akter said. Two policemen suffered minor wounds, he added.
Bangladesh has been convulsed by rising Islamist violence over the past year in which four online critics of religious militancy were hacked to death, a US citizen among them. Attacks on foreigners are rare in Bangladesh.
The South Asian nation is on alert after two foreigners were shot dead last week in attacks claimed by the Islamic State group, although police said there was no evidence the group was behind the attacks.
Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen fighters have been sought since the group detonated nearly 500 bombs across Bangladesh on a single day in 2005. Later attacks on several courts killed 25 people and wounded hundreds.
Police said nine hand grenades, 120 rounds of ammunition, pistols, knives and a large quantity of bomb-making materials were seized in Monday’s raid.
Separately, police arrested a member of the student wing of the Jamaat-e Islami party yesterday in connection with an attack on a Christian priest in northwest Bangladesh.
Three Muslim men tried to slit the priest’s throat while he was preaching, police said.
Attacks on members of Bangladesh’s small Christian community are rare.
Yesterday, an opposition activist and a businessman were remanded in police custody for questioning about the murder of a Japanese farmer, an attack claimed by the Islamist State group.
A court ordered the pair detained for 10 days over the shooting of Hoshi Kunio on Saturday in the northern city of Rangpur, the second foreigner killed in less than a week.
“A magistrate court in Rangpur remanded the two into custody for 10 days for intensive interrogation over the murder,” investigating officer Mamunur Rashid said.
Rashid said police picked up the pair just hours after the murder, although they have not been named as suspects.
One of them, Rashedun Nabi Biplob, is a former leader of the main opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party’s (BNP) student wing and an active member, the party said.
Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina has blamed the BNP and its Islamist ally, Jamaat-e-Islami, for instigating attacks on the foreigners, a claim rejected by
the parties.
Humayun Kabir Hira, the second man remanded, became friends with Kunio who leased farmland from Hira’s brother-in-law in the town of Kaunia, according to police and another newspaper.
Three men riding on a motorbike shot the 66-year-old Kunio dead after stopping his rickshaw on a dirt road.
The jihadist group later claimed responsibility for the killing, according to the SITE Intelligence Group, a US monitoring organisation, although
experts are dubious.
IS also said it was behind the killing of Italian aid worker Cesare Tavella on September 28 as he was jogging in Dhaka’s diplomatic quarter. No one has been arrested over that murder.
Experts say Islamist militants pose a growing danger in Muslim-majority Bangladesh, warning that a long-running political crisis has radicalised opponents of the government.
The assassination of four atheist bloggers since the turn of the year undermines the government’s efforts to play down the threat posed by hardliners, experts say.
