Md Joynal Abedin Khan :The Neo Jama’atul Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB) outfit is recruiting affluent and educated people, including physicians, engineers and technologists, by using encrypted apps to make ‘squad team’ to establish its ideological belief, detective sources said. They added the JMB outfit makes recruitment and communications using encrypted apps and operates through sleeper cells as law enforcers had long struggled to get a clear concept of its network and leadership. Apart from training in explosive-making and shooting, the Neo JMB has been providing to its members radical motivation, they said.According to sources, it has more than 8,000 members in the capital and other parts of the country. The organisation operates its activities by three types of members — Shurah member (policy maker), Ehshab (commanding worker) and Gayer Ehshab (general member). Besides, it has more than 300 ‘suicide squad members’, like Isba (attak) and Dayee (publicity) in the country, mainly in cities and 16 northern districts.The JMB members are active in guise of businessman, job holder and hawker as well as photostat machine shop, cosmetic shop, mobile retailer agent and flexi load, they said.They conduct their organizational activities along with leaflet branch, hand bills branch, explosive branch and IT branch, the sources added.”JMB outfit, who became inactive after Mawlana Saidur Rahman took over as the chief following Abdur Rahman’s execution in 2007, has formed the Neo JMB,” said Monirul Islam, Chief of Counter Terrorism and Transitional Crime (CTTC) unit. Stirred by the activities and more radical views of the Neo JMB, a good number of activists from the original JMB, who had become almost inactive after Saidur’s arrest in May 2010, also joined the faction, the CTTC chief said.Monirul Islam said that with several of its activists arrested and killed in Gulshan, Sholakia and in Kalyanpur, the Neo JMB has been weakened.They have already busted several trainging camps which were oeparated in the name of research center and general residence in last few months, he said, adding they used to meet at the camps to communicate with the international terror group Al-Quaeda. “The Neo JMB has a few hundred leaders and activists,” a high official of Police Headquarters, who deals with militancy, told The New Nation. The present leaders and activists are commited to train-up the new members for underground training, information technology (IT), militant attacks and fund collection, the police official said.They are nurturing the new members as they become far more radicalised and fearsome during target attaks across the country, he added.Although the original JMB carried out terrorist activities to establish Shariah law, the Neo JMB believed in establishment of a ‘caliphate’ — a state governed in accordance with Islamic law by a ‘caliph’, he opined.The Neo JMB, as called by law enforcers, is now inspired by the ideology of Islamic State (IS), skilled in modern technology and equipped with sophisticated firearms, Police Headquarter sources said. The Neo JMB emerged in 2014 after IS burst onto the international scene. Shaykh Abdur Rahman established JMB in April 1998 and it was banned in 2005.Earlier, the old JMB on August 17, 2005 struck terror across the country almost simultaneously detonating 459 bombs in 63 out of the 64 districts.After the synchronised attacks, a total of 160 cases were filed across the country. Police have completed probe into the cases.They have submitted final reports in 17 cases and charge sheets in 143 cases. In the charge sheets, 1,157 JMB leaders and activists have been made accused, according to an estimate of the Police Headquarters.An official record shows between 2007 and 2014, 478 JMB men were tried in 177 cases. Of them, 51 top leaders of JMB were sentenced to death, 178 got life imprisonment and 245 were jailed for different terms.On March 29, 2007, JMB leaders Abdur Rahman and Bangla Bhai were executed for killing two Jhalakathi judges.
