Key terrorist suspect on the run in India arrested in country’s Nalbari district
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Version 0 of 1. A key terrorist suspect on the run in India, believed to have been involved in a plot to assassinate prime minister Sheikh Hasina of Bangladesh, has been arrested. Shahnor Alom, who was detained in a village in the northeastern state of Assam on Friday night, is an operative of a banned Bangladeshi group active in eastern India, a senior intelligence officer said on Saturday. Speaking to Reuters, the officer said: “Based on specific intelligence, he was caught last night hiding in his relative’s house in a village in Nalbari district.” The officer did not wish to be identified as he is not authorised to speak to the media. Indian security officials claim to have uncovered the plot against Hasina in October after two members of the Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB) organisation were killed in an explosion while building homemade bombs in Burdwan, in the state of West Bengal, which borders Bangladesh. A third was critically injured. Extremist documents and bomb-making manuals were recovered from the site. Alom had been on the run since the blast. Indian authorities fear threat levels in the emerging south Asian power are rising with a series of local and regional factors combining to increase the risk of an attack. These include the withdrawal of western troops from Afghanistan, the election of a controversial rightwing prime minister in India itself, deteriorating relations between the country and its hostile neighbour Pakistan and the impact of the Islamic State. “The storm clouds are gathering,” one western security official in India told the Guardian last month. Indian authorities have long feared a threat originated in their western neighbour – the attackers who launched a bloody gun and grenade assault on Mumbai in 2008 were from the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Toiba organisation – but have only recently become concerned about Bangladesh. Bangladesh, one of the world’s biggest Muslim majority countries with a population of around 150m, has suffered three major army coups and two dozen smaller rebellions since gaining independence from Pakistan in 1971 in a war that killed and displaced millions. The centre left Awami League party won contested elections in January which saw widespread violence pitting Islamist youth organisations and opposition activists against security authorities. Indian authorities have long been concerned about the country’s porous 2,200-km border with Bangladesh and the possibility that JMB or others were using West Bengal as a sancturary. The group fragmented under pressure of Bangladeshi security forces following a wave of several hundred almost simultaneous low-grade bombs in 2005 across the country, including in the capital, Dhaka. Some local officials fear an alliance among violent extremist groups in Bangladesh and Burma. Investigators have noted similarities in bomb-making techniques between the JMB and the home-grown network known as the Indian Mujahideen. In November, warships based in Kolkata, the eastern india port and capital of West Bengal state, were moved offshore after intelligence was received of a potential attack on them similar to that launched by the new al-Qaida in South Asia group in Karachi earlier in the autumn. |