After Pakistan, its Bangladesh’s turn to admit that its territory is being used for launching terrorist activities against India. A welcome development from the new government.:k:
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Banned terror group still active in Bangladesh
Dhaka: Bangladesh has for the first time admitted that its territory and porous borders may have been used by terrorist groups to target India and says it is committed to acting against them.
The Harkat-ul-Jehadi Islami (HuJI), the anti-Indian militant group, continues to function in Bangladesh though it has been banned, admitted Hasan Mahmud, Bangladesh’s Minister of State for Foreign Affairs.
Mahmud, in an exclusive interview to CNN-IBN, said HuJI “definitely” exists in Bangladesh despite a ban on it. “They are banned, but they are in hideouts now,” he said.
Asked whether the Bangladesh Government was trying to trace HuJI hideouts, Mahmud said, “definitely, we are trying to find out their locations.”
The Minister promised a crackdown on militant groups and alleged terrorists in the South Asian region had “cross-border linkages”.
A “crackdown will indeed happen because terrorist attacks, which have been happening in the region in the past few months, even in Mumbai, there are cross-border linkages of these terrorists. Not only Lashkar (Laskhar-e-Toiba) and HuJI, but other terror organisations also. They (were) trained in Afghanistan, they were in Pakistan (and) then they came here,” he said.
Mahmud said Bangladesh was willing to hand over United Liberation Front of Asom leader Anup Chetia, who has been in a Bangladeshi jail since 1996, to India. “We have mutually agreed on the handover; now we have to decide on the formalities of how to handover. It will also include handover of Bangladeshi criminals who have fled to India,” he said.
Bangladesh’s image has taken a beating in recent years, particularly under the governance of Khaleda Zia. The county was regarded as a hub of terror in South Asia and there were fears that Bangladesh would turn into an Afghanistan.
The new Bangladesh government seems eager to change that image.