Cops capture 2 'ISIS recruitees'

A UK citizen of Bangladeshi origin is now in Dhaka to recruit fighters for ISIS, detectives said yesterday after the arrest of “two of his recruits”.

On Wednesday night, a DB team arrested Asif Adnan, 26, and Fazle Elahi Tanzil, 24, who had allegedly been planning to go to Syria through Turkey with the help of the UK citizen.

Son of a former judge, Asif was detained from their Segunbagicha residence, and Fazle Elahi Tanzil, son of a senior bureaucrat, from the government quarters at Eskaton.

For their travel to Syria, they were supposed to pose as members of Tabligh Jamaat, a peaceful movement for spreading Islamic values, investigators learned during interrogation.

The UK citizen, who recruited the two youths, came to Bangladesh in April. He held meetings with a group of militants at Azad Mosque in the capital's Gulshan and at the shrine of Hazrat Shahjalal in Sylhet, officials said.

“A foreign recruiter, who fought against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, is in Dhaka to recruit such fighters,” Joint Commissioner Monirul Islam of Dhaka Metropolitan Police (DMP) told journalists yesterday.

Detectives believe several other foreigners might be active in Bangladesh looking for potential ISIS jihadists.

“We can learn about others if we can arrest the UK citizen,” Additional Deputy Commissioner Saiful Islam, who led the drives to arrest the duo, told The Daily Star.

Detectives went after Asif and Tanzil following information gleaned from seven Jama'atul Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB) men arrested in Ashulia on September 19. 

Now on remand, the seven include JMB's acting chief Abdullah al-Tasneem alias Nahid and another leader Sikander Ali Noki.

Asif introduced the UK citizen to Nahid and Noki and they started working together to recruit ISIS fighters across the country, investigators learnt after quizzing them.

Detectives also have retrieved text messages Asif and Tanzil had exchanged, Joint Commissioner Monirul Islam said at a news briefing at the DMP Media Centre yesterday.

The two also sent text messages, as invitations for jihad, to different cell phone numbers.

Monirul claimed that Asif in a text message to Tanzil wrote: “I just want to be in the land of jihad...live a life only for Allah.”

According to another message, Asif was waiting for instructions whether to leave for Syria or Myanmar.

“It depends on the directives of AQIS [al-Qaeda in Indian Sub-Continent] and Nusra [al-Qaeda's Syrian affiliate, al-Nusra Front],” the message also read.

Though investigators claim Asif was an ISIS recruit, the content of the text message provided by the officials clearly suggests that he was waiting for al-Qaeda directives.

International media reports indicate that ISIS and al-Qaeda widely differ from one another in views and strategies.

Al-Qaeda supremo Ayman al-Zawahiri and the core of the organisation are locked in a row with ISIS for the leadership of the global jihadist movement.

ISIS, a militant group which has imposed its brutal rule over swathes of Syria and Iraq, was expelled from al-Qaeda in February after it rejected Zawahiri's demand that it restrict activities to Iraq.

Investigators also claim both Asif and Tanzil are supporters of Ansarullah Bangla Team, an emerging radical militant group nurturing al-Qaeda ideology.

In the changed global jihadi context, Ansarullah started working with the JMB with an aspiration to join jihad under ISIS, they added.

Asif, an economics graduate from Dhaka University, and Tanzil, who has completed A-level, disclosed during interrogations the names of some others willing to join ISIS.

REMOTE-CONTROLLED BOMB?

Another detective team led by ADC Sanwar Hossain arrested three members of the banned outfit Harkat-ul-Jihad al-Islami (Huji) at Rampura in the capital on Wednesday evening.

Of the arrested, Khairul Islam, 24, is a third-year student at Islamic University of Technology in Gazipur while Shafiqul Islam, 35, and Ahsan Ullah, 24, hailed from Tangail.

Sanwar said the trio were working to develop a device to detonate bombs from a distance of around half a kilometre.

The DB team also recovered some electronics materials and a diagram for making such device, he added.