Dhaka desk: Absconding militant leaders are trying to rapidly collect new members for their outfits, despite continuous anti-militant drives by law enforcement agencies, sources in law enforcement agencies said. The militant organisations are facing a severe manpower shortage after they lost some high-profile militant leaders and trained members during special drives in the previous months. The militant outfits want to regain their striking power by hiring new faces, the sources said when they were asked about the recent incidents of going missing by some youths.
At least six youths, including two North South University students and two Pabna Medical College students, went missing recently. The sources said after a long break, banned Islamist group Harkat-ul-Jihad (HUJI) is again trying to regroup, taking the advantage of the weakness of recently emerged terror bodies, including Ansarullah Bangla Team (ABT) and the Neo-JMB. The additional director general (operations) of Rapid Action Battalion (RAB), Lt Col Anwar Latif Khan said on Thursday that until the militant groups carry out attacks their activities are not seen.
“But there are several militant groups and we are trying to catch them before they can carry out attacks. We assume they are trying to recruit new members. But to fight them, we have also intensified our intelligence network,” he added. Referring to the two students of Pabna Medical College who recently went missing, Siddikur Rahman, superintendent of police, Pabna, told this correspondent that if the two had joined any militant organisation, it was not possible that they became linked with militants all of a sudden.
Militant leaders might have targeted the two to recruit them to overcome their manpower shortage. On December 1, Safayet Hossain and Jayen Hossain Khan Pavel, both students of NSU, Sujon, a private employee, and Mehedi vanished from the Banani area. Two other youths also went missing. They are all close friends and aged between 22 and 25. The additional deputy commissioner of the Dhaka Metropolitan Police (Detective Branch–North) Md Shajahan Shaju told this correspondent that among the four missing youths, Safayet is definitely a militant. Supporting the statement, a senior officer of the Counter Terrorism and Transnational Crime (CTTC) unit said normally youths wanting to join militant groups leave house at the beginning of a month or at the end.
These youths vanished on December 1, which primarily indicates their possible links with militants, he opined. After the mysterious disappearance of the four youths, including two North South University students, from the city’s Banani area on December 1, two more youths, one an MBBS student, went missing from the Banani and Dhaka Cantonment areas. They were identified as Imran Farhad, 20, and his friend, Sayeed Anwar Khan, 18. Thus, six youths went missing in a week. The police suspect that they left home to join militant groups.
Two students of Pabna Medical College—Zakir Hossain Biplov and Tanvir Ahmed Tonnoy—disappeared last week. The RAB yesterday arrested five militants of the banned Harkat-Ul-Jihad from Chittagong’s Pahartali area and seized arms and explosives from them. They were primarily identified as Taijul Islam, Nazim Uddin, Md Hafez Abu Zafar, Nur-e-Alam and Ibtisham Ahmed. The five were close aides of detained HUJI chief, Mufti Mainul Islam, said RAB media wing director Mufti Mahmud Khan. Twelve improvised explosive devices (IEDs), two pistols, nine magazines, 167 rounds of ammunition and a large number of religiously inciting books were seized from them.
