Staff Reporter :A Dhaka court on Monday placed four Islamic State militant group leaders, including its chief coordinator in Bangladesh, on a five-day remand. The Metropolitan Magistrate, Mizanur Rahman, passed the order after the members of the Detective Branch (DB) of police produced them before the court with a prayer for 10-day remand. Earlier, the DB police in separate drives arrested the four IS militants from the capital’s Jatrabari and Khilkhet areas on Sunday night.The arrested IS members were identified as Shakhawatul Kabir, the regional commander in Bangladesh, Anwar Hossain, Rabiul Islam, and Nazrul Alam, police said. Masudur Rahman, Deputy Commissioner of Dhaka Metropolitan Police (DMP) said that two teams of the DB conducted separate drives in the city’s Jatrabari and Khilkhet areas around 4:30am and arrested four IS members. Police also seized laptops and jihadi leaflets from their possessions, he said. The arrested men have confessed that they are members of Islamic State and Kabir has been frequently travelling to India, Pakistan and other countries for few months, the police official said. A case was filed under Anti-Terrorism Act against the four, he added.Later, in a press briefing at the DMP media centre, Sheikh Nazmul Alam, Deputy Commissioner of DMP North, said that their link with the IS was confirmed after primary interrogation.”They confessed their involvement with the militant outfit,” he said. Sakhawat Kabir is the Bangladesh regional commander of the IS. His prime target was media focus with acts of sabotage and murder of prominent individuals in the country.”Through the exposure, he would have gone for recruitment,” police official Nazmul said.As an English department student of Titumir College in Dhaka, Sakhawat went for a business involving computers before completing his studies. “There he became an IT expert.”He joined the now banned militant outfit Jama’atul Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB) in 2006 and later joined the IS in Pakistan in 2009 and fought for the group there.”He was a close aide of Sajjad alias Aka Ezaz, Aka Aziz, the Karachi chapter IS chief who died in a police crackdown after the blast at Peshawar that killed at least 140 people, mostly children.”After he came back to the country, his primary objective was to recruit IS operatives in Bangladesh.
