A Bangladesh court yesterday sentenced five Islamist militants to 10 years in prison for carrying out explosions in 2005 as part of a deadly nationwide bombing campaign that shook the nation.
A court in the southeastern district of Rangamati convicted the five members of banned group Jamayetul Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB) over two explosions in the area, police Inspector Mominul Islam said.
“Six JMB militants were charged with the bombings. One was acquitted and five others were sentenced to 10 years in jail,” Islam said.
The twin blasts were part of synchronised bombings carried out on August 17, 2005 across all Bangladesh cities and almost all districts that left two people dead.
Those blasts and subsequent bombings later that year, that killed 28 people, shook the mainly moderate Muslim nation of 160mn people whose government had earlier denied the presence of any militant groups.
Hundreds of suspected militants were later arrested and JMB’s top leaders executed in 2007.
In recent months, police have blamed a regrouped JMB for an upsurge in deadly violence, including the murder of two foreigners last year and deadly attacks on minority Shia and Sufi Muslims and Christians.
The government has rejected the Islamic State’s claims of responsibility for some of those attacks, saying IS has no presence in Bangladesh.
Bangladesh has been plagued by unrest in the last three years, and experts say a long-running political crisis has radicalised opponents of the government.
At least five militants of Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen have been killed in shootouts since November, as security forces stepped up a crackdown on Islamist militants seeking to make the moderate Muslim nation a Sharia-based state.
Murder convict to be
extradited: The process to extradite Daud Merchant, convicted for music baron Gulshan Kumar’s murder, to India has started, said Bangladesh Home Minister Asaduzzaman Khan Kamal.
Merchant, an aide of Dubai based underworld don Dawood Ibrahim, was in Bangladeshi prison for five years after he trespassed into the country in 2009, bdnews24.com reported.
Merchant was rearrested outside Gazipur’s Kashimpur Jail as soon as he was released on bail on December 2, 2014.
The following day police presented him before a Dhaka court and secured a three-day remand to question him.
Merchant was arrested on May 28, 2009, from Brahmanbarhia in Bangladesh.
He was serving life sentence in an Indian jail from 2002.
Mumbai police said he absconded on being released on parole in April 2009 to visit his family in Mumbra, near Mumbai.
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