India terror network organizer held in Bangladesh

DHAKA: Bangladesh authorities have arrested four top militants, including Jamaatul Islam Mujahideen's new offshoot 'Islam and Muslim group' chief Abdur Rahim Shahadat, who reportedly organized the terror network in frontier Maldah district of India, officials said here.

"Shahadat claimed he organized JMBs Maldah unit which currently has nearly 2,000 operatives," a senior police officer told PTI after the Special Branch announced that they have arrested Shahadat from suburban Gazipur.

The official said, in initial interrogation Shahadat admitted that after the 2006 arrest of JMB chief Shaikh Abdur Rahman and his second-in-command Siddikul Islam 'Bangla Bhai', he fled the country to take refuge in Maldah and organized the JMB's "foreign unit" also in Nadia and Murshidabad districts of West Bengal in subsequent two-and-half-years.

Security officials earlier said they had gathered clues that JMB developed a network in West Bengal centering Maldah as an overseas "organizational district" of the banned outfit.

Shahadat's arrest was part of an intensified anti-militant campaign by Special Branch of police, which also arrested three other JMB leaders from Dhaka and northwestern frontier district of Rajshahi, where the outfit was founded several years ago.