The pace and magnitude of “terrorist attacks” in Bangladesh continued to decline in 2018, although a secularist writer was killed and a university professor was seriously injured in separate incidents, says a US report.
The Country Reports on Terrorism 2018 released by the US Department of State on Saturday said Bangladeshi security forces continued a counterterrorism campaign that claimed to have disrupted planned attacks, captured suspected militant leaders, and seized caches of weapons, ammunition, and explosives.
However, the report in its Bangladesh part said judicial impediments to the “successful prosecution” of terrorists and allegations of “extrajudicial killings” by security forces during counterterrorism raids have inhibited broader counterterrorism successes.
The government of Bangladesh continued to articulate a “zero-tolerance” policy toward terrorism and the use of its territory as a terrorist safe haven, the report reads.
The government of Bangladesh government often attributed terrorist violence to local militants.
The US report said al-Qa’ida in the Indian Subcontinent (AQIS) and ISIS have together claimed responsibility for nearly 40 attacks in Bangladesh since 2015.
It said, terrorist organisations used social media to spread their ideologies and solicit followers from Bangladesh.
On June 11, 2018, suspected terrorists murdered Shajahan Bachchu, a secularist writer and political activist in Munshiganj, according to the US report.
While the investigation is ongoing, Bangladeshi security forces suspect that the perpetrators were affiliated with AQIS, says the US report. On March 3, 2018, a man self-identifying as a member of an AQIS-affiliated group, attacked Zafar Iqbal, a professor at a university in Sylhet, claiming that Iqbal was an “enemy of Islam”.
