Staff Reporter :Home Minister Asaduzzaman Kamal has said that the fear of attacks on US citizens residing in Bangladesh is ‘baseless’.”There is nothing to panic [for US citizens]. We think, the fear of fresh attacks on foreigners residing in Bangladesh is totally baseless,” the minister said just a day after the US State Department issued security alert for US citizens in Bangladesh. The US State Department also asked its citizens living in Bangladesh to remain cautious and vigilant. It further said the US authorities had ‘reliable information to suggest that terrorist attacks could occur against foreigners in Bangladesh, particularly at large gatherings of foreigners.”Rejecting the possibility of terror attack, Kamal said “The UK and the US regularly issue such alert for their citizens. It’s their routine work.”A spokesman of the US embassy in Dhaka on Wednesday said that the travel alert “does not reflect a new threat. It is intended to inform the public of the existing threat.””The alert does not reflect a new threat. The alert is intended to remind the public of the existing threat, given the increased number of foreigners expected to travel in the near future,” the US Embassy spokesman said.Earlier quoting the US State Department’s travel alert note, the international news agency Reuters said that foreigners might be attacked again in Bangladesh. The US State Department on Tuesday urged the Americans to be cautious and vigilant in that country.A Japanese citizen was shot dead in Bangladesh on October 3 and an Italian aid worker was killed in the capital Dhaka on September 28.”There is reliable information to suggest that terrorist attacks could occur against foreigners in Bangladesh, particularly at large gatherings of foreigners,” the State Department said in a travel alert that cited the two killings as well as the October 24 bombing of a Shiite religious procession.”In 2015, there has been a series of threats and terrorist attacks targeting writers, publishers, and others in the media, and a US citizen blogger,” it added. “The US government assesses that the terrorist threat remains real and credible, and further attacks are possible.”Attacks on foreigners are relatively rare in Bangladesh, despite a rising trend of violence over the past year that has seen four online freethinkers hacked to death, among them a US citizen of Bangladeshi origin.
