The suspected militant, identified as Ashfaqur Rahman, worked as the IT head of the al Qaeda-inspired militant group Ansarullah Bangla Team, the chief of Bangladesh’s counter-terrorism police, Monirul Islam, told a news conference.<\/p>\n
Rahman was arrested late on Monday in the capital, Dhaka, he added, as the handcuffed man was paraded before the media.<\/p>\n
Islam said Rahman was a close aide of the group\u2019s head of military operations, former army major Syed Mohammad Ziaul Haque, who went into hiding after the Bangladesh military accused him of involvement in a plot to topple the government in 2011.<\/p>\n
Rahman, who joined the militant group while studying computer science at university, used to gather information including the movements of targeted bloggers by hacking into their social media accounts, Islam said.<\/p>\n
The authorities blame Ansarullah Bangla Team for a series of attacks since February 2015 in which at least five bloggers, a publisher and two gay rights activists were hacked to death.<\/p>\n
Al Qaeda and Islamic State have claimed responsibility for killings of foreigners, liberals and members of religious minorities in Bangladesh, a majority-Muslim nation of 160 million people, over the past few years.<\/p>\n
The government denies either group has a presence in Bangladesh, blaming home-grown groups instead.<\/p>\n
Police and army commandos have killed more than 60 suspected militants and arrested hundreds since a deadly attack on a Dhaka cafe in July last year. Twenty-two people were killed, most of them foreigners<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The suspected militant, identified as Ashfaqur Rahman, worked as the IT head of the al Qaeda-inspired militant group Ansarullah Bangla Team, the chief of Bangladesh’s counter-terrorism police, Monirul Islam, told a news conference. Rahman was arrested late on Monday in the capital, Dhaka, he added, as the handcuffed man was paraded before the media. Islam said Rahman was a close… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":17,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-727","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-analysis-post"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/southandcentralasiablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/727","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/southandcentralasiablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/southandcentralasiablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/southandcentralasiablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/17"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/southandcentralasiablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=727"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/southandcentralasiablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/727\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":728,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/southandcentralasiablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/727\/revisions\/728"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/southandcentralasiablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=727"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/southandcentralasiablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=727"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/southandcentralasiablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=727"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}