China starts anti-terror drill with Tajikistan amid Afghan spillover worries

19 Aug 2021

 The HUJ-B and the JMB have killed more than 100 people, including politicians, academics and people of different faiths, over the past decades. On August 17, 2005, the JMB detonated 500 bombs in 63 of Bangladesh’s 64 districts, killing three people and wounding more than 100. The group had aimed to establish a Taliban-style government in the country by force. Bangladeshi security forces, however, arrested most of the top militants within a few years. They were found guilty and executed for assassinating two judges in a 2005 bomb attack and for masterminding the bomb blasts across the country.

Bangladesh police on November 27, 2019, escort  Islamist extremists accused of plotting the Holey  Artisan Bakery attack. File photo: AFP

 Experts said those seeking to join the Taliban would now be doing so at a time of increased security measures, as the country had boosted its anti-terrorism efforts over the  last 20 years.

The last major terrorist attack occurred in July 2016, when Islamic State-linked militants opened fire at a bakery in 

Dhaka. Twenty-two people, mostly foreigners, were killed in the Holey Artisan Bakery incident. 

“The police commissioner is perhaps right that there are people who have been and will be trying to go. But on the other hand, there is a growing capacity of the law and enforcement agency and the society as a whole,” said Shahab Enam Khan, a professor at Jahangirnagar University and research director at the Bangladesh Enterprise Institute.