Bangladesh police nab five militants planning bomb attacks

Bangladeshi security officials have announced the arrest of five local members of a militant group that allegedly intended to carry out bombings in capital Dhaka.

According to the reports, the Friday development came as security forces were on a hunt to capture the mastermind of a bloody assault in Dhaka last month, with authorities saying that the suspects, including four would-be bombers and a bomb-maker, were dispatched to the capital to enhance the operational capability of the Bangladesh branch of the so-called Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen (JMB) terrorist group.

"All of them were from the northern part of the country and were sent to Dhaka," said chief of Dhaka’s counter-terrorism police unit, Monirul Islam, as quoted in a Reuters report. 

He said the suspects had had plans to launch attacks on high-profile targets in the city but did not elaborate.

The report further cited Islam as saying that police officers recovered 25 detonators and a huge amount of raw materials for explosives at the site of their arrest in Kalyanpur, the same suburb where police killed nine suspected JMB members on July 26.

The country’s security officials have accused JMB, which has pledged allegiance to the Daesh Takfiri terrorist group, of a series of attacks over the past 18 months that has led to surging concerns over the threat of militancy in the Muslim-majority South Asian nation.

SS