Pakistan and its notorious ISI have been the biggest threat to Bangladesh as they keep sending their operatives to Bangladesh to destabilize the country by strengthening the roots of Islamic terrorism, says the former Bangladeshi minister and member of the parliament Hasan Ul-Inu .
The Bangladeshi lawmaker points out that the ISI backed Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) has been working to strengthen the roots of Islamic extremism in Bangladesh, which was formed in 1971 as a secular country.
“Pakistan’s ISI has been trying to destabilize Bangladesh from the time Bangladesh became independent and these aspects cannot be ignored,” Hasan Ul-Inu was quoted as saying on Bangladeshi news portal bangladeshlivenews.com on Wednesday.
Mentioning the findings of investigation reports of 2016 terrorist attack on Holey Artisan Bakery in Dhaka which was carried out by Jamat-ul Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB), Hasan who was the information minister, said the JMB terrorists had gone to Pakistan and then to Afghanistan to receive military training by the LeT.
“The Dhaka attack could not have happened if the LeT had been dismantled and its commanders punished for carrying out the massacre in Mumbai in 2008,” he said.
Twenty hostages including one Indian were killed in a siege at a cafe in Dhaka where dozens of diners were held captive by militants for 11 hours on July1, 2016.
Citing the reports, Hasan claims that the same Pakistani terror group, Let, was behind the 26/11 Mumbai attacks and Dhaka attack. Terrorists had chosen upscale areas, where important government offices, businesses were located. The objective was to kill as many people as possible, especially foreigners.
“They chose to lay siege to the buildings rather than exploding themselves with bombs and in both cases, the terrorists were well-trained, armed with sophisticated weapons, and could not be neutralised by local police. Army personnel had to be brought in,” Hasan said.
According to Bangladeshi experts, the ISI has been using its Lashkar front, Falah-E-Insaniat Foundation, to enter the Chittagong-Myanmar border area and the JMB and LeT have found to have been assisting the Rohingya Muslims, who are living in Cox's Bazar's Teknaf and remote areas of Bandarban in Bangladesh.
Myanmar's former President Htin Kyaw had blamed the Rohingya militant group Aqa Mul Mujahideen (AMM) for attacks on the country’s border posts. The Bangladesh-based AMM has been seeded by the Harkat-ul-Jihad Islami-Arakan (HUJI-A), which maintains close relations with the LeT and Pakistan Taliban, bangladeshlivenews.com says in its reports.
The AMM is recruiting youths from the Rohingya refugee camps and training them to carry out terror attacks in Bangladesh and India. For over a decade now, there has been strong cooperation among the LeT, JMB, AMM as many youths from Bangladesh are sent to Pakistan for training in arms and weapons.
“ISI is still an epicentre of terror. Not only in these two countries, but they also dispatch their operatives to Nepal, Maldives, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan and all over the SAARC countries,” said Wali-ur Rahman, former Adviser to Bangladesh’s Prime Minister on International Crimes.
There are several reports about how Pakistan ISI, under the guise of diplomats, are secretly meeting terror groups in Dhaka to organize terror attacks in Bangladesh and in India. The Bangladesh government believes that the Pakistan High Commission in Dhaka has emerged as a center of anti-government activities as well as activities against India.
Last month, Bangladesh’s Information and Broadcasting Minister M. Hasan Mahmud had also claimed that ‘pro-Pakistan’ elements were responsible for the country’s Durga Puja communal flare-up in October.
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