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SECOND EDITION

Foreign ties to Gulshan attack under scrutiny n Tribune Desk Investigators suspect that the three local militant groups who carried out the Gulshan terror attack were assisted by several foreign extremist groups as well as some homegrown militant leaders now staying abroad. The unified platform was established in 2014 as agreed by the detained top leaders of banned outfits Jama’atul Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB), Ansarullah Bangla Team and Hizb ut-Tahrir at Kashimpur High Security Jail, as their aim is the same – establishing Islamic rule in the country by uprooting the democratic forces. But the detectives have learnt about their joint activities after the Gulshan terror attack that killed 22 people mainly foreigners and injured over 40 people. They think the attack was launched based on an order issued by the detained leaders recently. Five attackers were killed in an operation in the morning of July 2 to end a nearly 11-hour hostage situation. International militant group Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attack and identified the five as their members. After the attack – unprecedented in the country where militants have been operating since 1992, the law enforcers said it was an act of the JMB. However, several intelligence sources later said that it was a combined operation. Sources close to investigation

STRAIGHT TALK n Zafar Sobhan The hostage crisis was still live on the night of July 1 when a strange thing happened. My social media feeds started filling up with posts from a certain kind of die-hard supporter of the government. While others were expressing shock and horror and were concerned as to the fate of the hostages, these factotums (or in some cases, functionaries) were focused on what was really important: Spinning the

POSSIBLE BLUEPRINT OF NETWORK BEHIND GULSHAN TERROR ATTACK FIRST TIER LEADERS Maj (sacked) Zia Ejaz Ahmed Tamim Ahmed Tehzeeb Karim Rezaur Razzak SECOND TIER LEADERS Salauddin Solaiman Rajib

Currently, Ansarullah chief Jasim Uddin Rahmani, former JMB chief Saidur Rahman, Harkat-ul Jihad al-Islami chief Abdur Rouf, and some other top militant leaders are in jail. They were kept at separate cells at Kashimpur jail after the Gulshan attack. Moreover, they were brought under 24-hour surveillance, said a senior official at the jail headquarters. A high official of an intelligence agency, requesting anonymity, said  PAGE 2 COLUMN 1

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JMB + Hizb ut-Tahrir

Islamic State

Ansarullah

Pakistan

Afghanistan

Malaysia

INT’L GROUPS

Gulshan Terror Attack ASMAUL HOQUE MAMUN/DT INFOGRAPHIC

told the Dhaka Tribune that the home-grown groups might have been assisted by some extremist organisations operating in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Several other top militant leaders now staying in Pakistan and Malaysia could be behind the operation. The investigators are yet to solve the puzzle but claimed to have identified some of the planners and coordinators. The names of top tier leaders now coming out include Maj (sacked) Syed M Ziaul Haque and

Ejaz Ahmed of Ansarullah; Tamim Ahmed Chowdhury, who is coordinating the IS members; Tehjib Karim, working for JMB; and Rezaur Razzak, a key player behind the revival of JMB and formation of Ansarullah. The militants who coordinated the Gulshan attack include JMB chief Salauddin alias Salehin, who was snatched from a prison van in 2014; and its leaders Solaiman and Rajib alias Shanto alias Adil. Location of these leaders could not be confirmed.

n Ashif Islam Shaon Scrapping a trial court's acquittal, the High Court yesterday handed down a seven-year jail sentence and a Tk20 crore fine to BNP Senior Vice-Chairman Tarique Rahman in a money laundering case. The High Court bench of Justice M Enayetur Rahim and Justice Amir Hossain also upheld a seven-year conviction for Tarique's friend and business partner Gias Uddin Al Mamun, but lowered his fine to Tk20 crore, half of what was originally fixed by the trial court on November 17, 2013. The bench asked the trial court to issue a conviction warrant against Tarique who has been living in London on parole since 2008, with a number of arrest warrants in several cases. The elder son of ex-prime minister and BNP chief Khaleda Zia was a fugitive throughout the case proceedings at the trial court as well as at the High Court. The decision was announced in a courtroom filled with lawyers and journalists, while additional law enforcers were deployed outside. “Since convict Md Tarique Rahman has been absconding, the sentence of imprisonment as awarded shall be executed after causing his arrest or when he surrenders before the trial court, whichever is earlier,” Justice M Enayetur Rahim read out. The court said the order of

Planned in Jail

Lashkar-e-Taiba Tehreek-e-Taliban Jaish-e-Mohammed

Tarique gets 7 years for money laundering

No more mistakes crisis and deflecting blame for it from the government. They had good reason to be worried. When the government has spent the past year chasing imaginary terrorists instead of the real ones, dismissing solid evidence that attacks were the handiwork of IS, instead blaming it on BNP and Jamaat, when they have consistently dismissed attack after attack as isolated incidents and claimed to have things under control, and when the Holey and

Sholakia incidents came immediately following a much-touted crackdown which supposedly netted 18,000 people, how can the government escape a measure of culpability for what occurred? It is the government’s job to keep us safe, and it signally failed in this duty. But what is worse is that it failed, not because the attacks were unforeseeable or impossible to stop or occurred despite comprehensive measures to ensure public safety, but because it has spent the past

year playing politics with the nation’s security and refusing to accept the truth of this new threat that Bangladesh is now facing. Why this should have been the case remains a mystery. Until recently, the government had stellar anti-terror credentials and that it could be trusted to do what it takes to combat the terror threat. More than that, its anti-terror credentials were its trump card in defense of its own tenure in office, both inside the country as well as out,

its response to questions about its democratic legitimacy. When it came to counter-terror and ensuring that Islamists be kept from power and on the run, the argument went, the AL was the only game in town. They were the only party we could trust to fight militancy and ensure that Bangladesh did not go down the path of Islamism. This argument was largely accepted in the international community, and to some extent, inside Bangladesh  PAGE 2 COLUMN 5