Bangladesh arrests ‘Islamist militants’ after Singapore alert

Bangladesh police on Tuesday arrested five suspected Islamist militants after being alerted to their alleged extremist activities by authorities in Singapore who had deported them.

Officers from Dhaka Metropolitan Police said they arrested the five in Dhaka’s Banasree district and seized jihadist materials from the former migrant workers.

“They are Islamist militants who have been sent back from Singapore recently,” said city police spokesman Maruf Hossain Sorder, adding that Singapore authorities had informed police about the five.

The head of the force’s Counter Terrorism and Transnational Crime unit, Monirul Islam, told reporters: “Singapore has accused them of inviting people to (engage in) extremism.”

The arrest coincides with the Singapore government’s announcement on Tuesday that it had detained eight Bangladeshi men who allegedly plotted to carry out terror attacks back home.

The suspects were detained under the city-state’s tough Internal Security Act in April and had originally planned to go to Syria to join the Islamic State group, the Singapore home ministry said.

Bangladesh police did not say if all 13 men were part of the same group.

Muslim-majority Bangladesh is reeling from a string of killings of secular and liberal activists and religious minorities by suspected Islamist militants.

Transnational jihadist groups such as Islamic State group and an Al-Qaeda branch in Bangladesh have said they were behind most of these murders—claims bluntly rejected by Dhaka.