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December 4, 2005

Bangladesh: Gunfight With JMB Islamists in Tangail

The Daily Star reports that three policemen were injured in a confrontation with members of Jama'atul Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB), in a village in Tangail District.

A raid took place at 4 am on Saturday, focused on a club near a government school in the village of Habla Dakhshin Para in the upazila of Basail, Tangail. Police had been given a tip-off that 25 JMB militants had been sheltering in the club premises.

The shootout lasted 15 minutes, in which three police officers were hit by returned gunfire. The police were being treated at Tangail Police Lines hospital. The JMB men were able to flee, apparently unhurt.

On October 23 we reported the claims that JMB operatives were hiding out in Tangail. However, Tangail Superintendent of Police (SP) Mirza Abdullahil Baki said at the time that he had no information that militants were hiding in the char areas, as reported by the Daily Star at the time, in a report which descriped the arrivals of strangers in Tangail, "Hugra, Katuli and Nagarpur, along the Dhaleswari river, and the isolated hilly areas of Ghatail and forests of Madhupur and Sakhipur".

Baki visited the village of Habla Dakhsin Para today. Any doubts about JMB militance in the district of Tangail were dispelled after November 29 when a double suicide bomb attack took place against courthouses in Chittagong and Gazipur. The bomber at Chittagong survived, and confessed to police that it was in Tangail that he had plotted the attacks with other JMB members.

The bomber at Chittagong, Hossain Ali, claimed to come from Naura in Tangail district. He told interrogators from a hospital bed that plans of action were discussed in a mosque in Shakhipur upazila, Tangail district.

Hossain Ali died on Thursday from his injuries. He was a muajjin of a mosque in the region. The Star states that there are 25 mosques in the the southeastern upazilas of Mirzapur and Shakhipur (see map). Many of these mosques have been set up with funding from a Kuwaiti organisation, the Revival of Islam Heritage Society.

Locals said people from outside have been frequenting the mosques and holding meetings there for the last three years. The Taktarchala Dakhshin Bazar Mosque is one of the widely used meeting venues.

A number of locals in Taktarchala Dakhshin Bazar recently told The Daily Star that an unknown person introducing himself as a scholar from Medina University visited the mosque last year. He held several meetings inside the mosque with some other people.

They stopped the meetings as their activities raised suspicions among the villagers. Imam of the mosque Abdullah-hel-Baki acknowledged the incident to be true.

Tangail police have so far arrested 29 militants in the district since the August 17 serial blasts across the country.

Of them, 19 are now behind bars and Yameen Miah of Delduar has given confessional statement before a magistrate.

The Bangladesh Independent states that 19 people were arrested at various parts of the country on Sunday. Detainees include two Imams and a madrassa student. Abdul Aziz, 30, imam of Paharkanchanpur Ahle Hadith mosque, was arrested at Shakhipur, Tangail. Four other people were arrested from Tangail district.

The areas of the 25 mosques which are utilised by JMB activists also contain high numbers of the group AHAB (Ahle Hadith Andolon Bangladesh), which was led by Dr Muhammad Asadullah Al Ghalib until his arrest on Wednesday, Feb 23 this year at the Al Markajul Islam Madrasha.

Ghalib claimed after his arrest, "Whether we are hanged or jailed, our movement for Islam will continue". Ghalib, a teacher of Arabic at Rajshahi University, was also a member of JMB, which was also banned on Feb 23, when the government admitted after a long period of denial that JMB had existed. A month before, State Minister for Home Lutfozzaman Babar had denied their existence.

According to Asia Times, on Jan 26 he said "We don't know officially about the existence of the JMB. Only some so-called newspapers are publishing reports on it. We don't have their constitution in our record." By that time, according to an Awami League report, at least 34 bomb blasts between 1999 and February 2005 had taken place, in which 164 persons were killed and 1,735 people injured.

Ghalib had made audio tape recordings of his speeches, which were recovered from his quarters which spoke of a secret network of JMB cells throughout the nation, and of a training camp at Asmast in Pakistan.

Ghalib's AHAB group had, according to a report from India Monitor involvement with JMB's national bomb attacks on August 17. The attacks had been planned in April "while Kuwait based organisation Revival of Islamic Heritage Society (RIHS)* and an imam of a UK mosque funded the terrorist operation." An official of Bangladesh's police Special Branch stated that

the decision on the blasts was finalised after Moulana Ataur Rahman, imam of a mosque in the UK and also the director of Ahle Hadith Library and Information Centre at Nagheshwari in Kurigram, came to the country on April 17. He left the country on August 20, he said.

Moulana Ataur Rahman is the brother of Abdur Rahman, the head of JMB.

*RIHS, the Revival of Islamic Heritage Society is an organisation which seeks to spread Islam by funding actions aimed at destabilising already destabilised countries. They were placed on a US State Department exclusion list on Jan 9 2002, and this move was then adpted within days by the UN and the Bank of England.

The group is also known as Jamia Ihya ul Turath; a.k.a. Jamiat Ihia Al- Turath Al-Islamiya; a.k.a. Revival of Islamic Society Heritage on the African Continent. It has offices in Pakistan and even had a charity registered in Britain in 2002 as No 1014888. RIHS promotes an extreme doctrine of Salafism, a Sunni ideology which currently has many proponents who urge violent jihad.

Posted by Giraldus Cambrensis at December 4, 2005 5:32 PM

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