Bhubaneswar: Special task force (STF) of Kolkata Police, which arrested three Bangladeshi nationals on Sunday with suspected links with banned terrorist outfit Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB), on Tuesday said that some operatives could be in Odisha.
Joint commissioner of police, STF, V Solomon Nesakumar told the media that those arrested were living in a rented apartment at Haridevpur, on the outskirts of Kolkata. They posed as traders and sold fruits and mosquito nets.
The three have been identified as Naziur Rahman Pavel alias Joseph (30), Mikail Khan alias Sheikh Sabbir (30) and Rabiul Islam (22), all residents of Gopalganj in Bangladesh, while efforts are on to trace two other suspects – Sheikh Sakil and Salim Munshi, he said.
The IPS officer further said that literature and documents seized from the suspects prove their links with JMB. Apart from this, a diary seized from them has the names of Islamic State (IS) leaders.
The interrogation of the arrested revealed that 10 suspected JMB operatives from Bangladesh had infiltrated into West Bengal. Among them, five stayed back in West Bengal and the remaining five went to Odisha, Bihar and Jammu and Kashmir, he added.
An Islamic terrorist outfit, JMB now operates in Bangladesh. It is also listed as a terror group by the United Kingdom.
Founded in April 1998 in Palampur in Dhaka division by Abdur Rahman, JMB gained public prominence in 2001 when bombs and documents detailing the activities of the organisation were discovered at Parbatipur in Dinajpur district.
The outfit was later officially declared a terrorist organisation and banned by the Bangladesh government in February 2005 after attacks on NGOs. However, it struck back in August that year with 500 bomb attacks at 300 locations in Bangladesh.
The group committed several public murders in 2016 in northern Bangladesh as part of a wave of attacks on secularists.
