The police could not submit the charge-sheet in the Holey Artisan Bakery carnage even almost two years after the extremist attack that took place on July 1, 2016 in the capital’s Gulshan area. Several deadlines, including the last one for March, for submission of the charge-sheet have expired, but it was not submitted. The Counter Terrorism and Transnational Crime (CTTC) unit of Dhaka Metropolitan Police is in charge of preparing the charge-sheet who branded Tamim Ahmed Chowdhury, a Bangladesh-born Canadian citizen, as the mastermind of the attack and found no connection with any transnational extremist group. The investigators said they have already drafted the report and doing correction.
Investigators have also found that half of the suspected extremists were former operatives of banned Islamist outfit Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB). The investigators have so far found the involvement of 21 individuals in the attack. Of them, five were killed in the Holey Artisan operation during army commando operation and seven others were also killed in separate drives of law enforcers. The investigators claim that two other extremists of the gang fled to India. For the attack, arms, ammunition and explosives were brought from India and money came from Middle East. They extracted this information from the captured extremists during interrogation.
Though law enforcers declined any relation between JMB and militant organization Islamic State (IS), the organization claimed their responsibility for the attack. JMB, however, denied their involvement through an online statement. During the Holey Artisan attack, the photos of attacks and news were published on IS’s own website. The following day of the attack, photos of five militants were published on the same site claiming them to be jihadists of Islamic State.
JMB and other extremist groups in Bangladesh like those in other countries are strongly principled and are willing to kill anyone who opposes their philosophy of a distorted view of Islam. They are willing to die for their cause. Their philosophy makes them powerful and dangerous. And exactly that was happened in the case of Holey Artisan Bakery where several young energetic boys gave their lives after killing 22 innocent men and women.
It is surprising why CTTC is taking too much time in preparing the report while they have got plenty of time to collect evidence. The problem is the reluctance of our courts to protect one’s liberty on the whims of police. If bail is granted till charge-sheet is submitted the prosecution would have felt urgency about filing the charge-sheet.
