NEW DELHI: More than 100 city-bred boys in Dhaka and largers much numbers of rural youths have been reported missing by their parents in Bangladesh, Hasanul Haq Inu, the country’s information and broadcasting minister, told this newspaper.
The missing numbers are possibly indicative of many youth-with similar profiles and of age groups — as of the five terrorists who butchered 20 people in an upscale restaurant in Dhaka’s Gulshan area on July 1 — having joined jihadi terror groups.
Again on Thursday, eight young terrorists attacked an Id gathering at the Sholakia Idgah, Kishoreganj, killing three people and injuring 14.
“We have reports of about 100 missing urban youths from Dhaka missing while the numbers are much more in the rural areas where parents have come to report the matter in the village police stations,” Mr Inu said in a telephonic conversation.
Bangladesh PM Sheikh Hasina had sought information on youth
The effort to count the missing numbers kick-started after Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina appealed to parents to inform the police if any of their young members are missing. “We have learnt that many college and university students are missing. Don’t just file a GD, give us all the information and photos,” she had said on Thursday. A GD (general diary) is the initial police report.
The July 1 attack terrorists, well-educated and some from very affluent backgrounds, had been missing for several months. Terming the case of missing youth a “hype”, Mr Inu said: “It has been blown out of proportion. There are 1.5 crore young Facebook users in Bangladesh out of which 99.9 per cent have condemned the terrorist attacks.” “Youth joining terrorist ranks is not the general trend in Bangladesh. We are still not like Pakistan or Afghanistan, we remain fundamentally a democratic secular country,” said the minister who is also a member of the Ministerial Law and Order Special Committee.
Asked if his government still stood by its assertion that denied ISIS linkages and were all home-grown, Mr Inu said, “As per the reports coming in and from the interrogation of the arrested terrorists from the Kishoreganj Id attack, there seems to be no organisational link with ISIS or any other international terror outfit.” Asked about the involvement of others, the minister said, “As of now, we are not ruling out anything. We are looking at the ISIS option, the Pakistani connection, linkages to other global terror outfits, the Jamaat-e-Islamiat and even the Bangladesh Nationalist Party linkages. All are being explored.”
Meanwhile, in a video released by the ISIS on Wednesday, three militants speaking in Bengali and English from a street suspected to be located in the ISIS capital Raqqa, warned that the Dhaka terror attack was just an idea of what lay ahead and that such attacks will continue till the Bangladesh government was overthrown as it “seeks to govern by man-made laws while we (ISIS) want the rule of Allah’s law.”
