Most dangerous of the three
Most dangerous of the three
After years in the hunt for “Boma Mizan”, Rapid Action Battalion on the night of May 15, 2009, captured the explosives expert of banned Islamist outfit Jama'atul Mujahideen Bangladesh at Taltola in the capital.
The tensed standoff that followed Mizan's arrest tells how dangerous a man he is.
After his arrest, a Rab team took him to his home in Uttar Pirerbagh in the capital. As soon as they got to the doorstep around 10:30pm, Mizan signalled his wife Sharmin following which a bomb went off inside the house.
Sharmin tried to commit suicide by blowing herself up. She lost one of her hands in the blast and her two-year-old son Saifullah Sukaine Naim and two-month-old daughter Masroba Jannat Tora got injured.
After resisting arrest for around four hours, Mizan's wife finally gave in at 2:15am.
With his neatly trimmed beard, Mizan looked unsurprised over what was going on around him that night. "I am on a path to justice and truth, you too should follow the lead," he had told reporters at the scene.
Following the confessional statement of Mizan, also known as Zahidul Islam, Rab busted a “mini-munitions factory” of JMB in East Monipur of Mirpur and recovered 11 bombs, plastic explosives, grenade casings, fuses and detonators, a pistol, and a huge stock of chemicals.
Mizan from Shekherbhita of Jamalpur Sadar upazila was jailed for different terms for possessing arms, ammunitions, attacking a judge and exploding bombs.
He was given eight years' rigorous imprisonment in the sensational August-17, 2005, serial bomb blast case filed in Cox's Bazar. A Dhaka court on June 4, 2012, sentenced him and his wife to 37 years' of rigorous imprisonment each for possessing weapons and bullets. He was also given 34 years' of rigorous imprisonment in absentia for a bomb attack carried out on a judge in 2005.
Once a computer shop worker in Tangail, he was JMB ehsar (full-timer) since 2001 and had close relations with the executed militant kingpins Shaekh Abdur Rahman and Siddiqul Islam alias Bangla Bhai.
Mizan came to Rab's attention after the countrywide serial attacks on August 17, 2005. The intelligence unit of Rab believe Mizan had long been working as the explosives expert of JMB. He had been training militants on how to make bombs and improvised grenades.
After his arrest, he had told The Daily Star correspondents, "I don't explode bombs; I rather train others how to make bombs and grenades."
In 2003, Mizan was arrested in Jhikargachha of Jessore, but was out on bail after three months. Since then he had been on the run.
He had visited a number of countries including Afghanistan.