The government has ruled out the presence of the Islamic State in Bangladesh despite the radical group claiming responsibilities for a bomb attack on police in Dhaka on Apr 29, just seven days after the string of bombings in Sri Lanka leaving, which the group had claimed.
“The IS [Islamic State] has no operations in Bangladesh,” Home Minister Asaduzzaman Khan Kamal said in Chuadanga on Monday (May 6).
Speaking to the media after an event at the Chuadanga-based BGB headquarters, he claimed of an “international conspiracy” to establish that the terror group had operations in Bangladesh.
“Some people in the country, who went astray, are using the name of the group just to take some credit,” said Khan.
Security agencies in Bangladesh have stepped up vigilance and intelligence operations following the Sri Lanka attacks, he said.
“We have successfully tackled militancy in the past and that will be the case now as well,” said the home minister.
The issue of a local chapter of the Islamic State came into the spotlight after the late 2015 killings of an Italian aid worker in Dhaka and a Japanese national in Rangpur within five days.
The IS had reportedly claimed responsibility for the murders of the two foreigners and warned of more such attacks. The government had been denying since then of the terror group’s existence in Bangladesh.
The Holey Artisan hostage crisis in July 2016, one of the worst terror attacks in the history of Bangladesh leaving 29 people, including foreigners and the gunmen, killed, was also claimed by the Islamic State.
Bangladesh investigators, however, blamed neo-JMB, a splinter group of homegrown Jama’atul Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB), behind the attacks at the eatery, frequented by foreigners, at the diplomatic enclave of Gulshan in Dhaka.