Bangladesh has handed over three suspected Lashkar-e-Toiba operatives to Pakistan, a year after they were arrested on suspicion of plotting attacks on Indian and US embassies in Dhaka, officials said on Tuesday. "The three were under 'preventive detention' for the past one year and were freed and
deported yesterday in line with negotiations between our foreign ministry and the Pakistani embassy here," Deputy Commissioner of Detective Branch of Police Minirul Islam said.
He said a Pakistani embassy official received them at the Dhaka Central Jail while they were later were flown back to their country.
Jail officials said Pakistani nationals Syed Abdul Kaiyum Azhari alias Sufian, 22, Mohammad Ashraf Alias Zahid, 24, and Mohammad Monwar Ali, 30, were freed on orders from the Home Ministry.
Sufian was a mechanical engineering student at Islamic Institute of Technology in suburban Gazipur and the two others were diploma engineers.
Police earlier said despite having their valid passports and visas they could not show any work permit or explain source of funds for their living expenses when they were arrested.
Police and elite anti-crime Rapid Action Battalion arrested some 20 suspected Pakistani and Indian nationals in the past one year for their suspected links to the Pakistan-based LeT terror group as part of an intensified campaign against militancy but most of them were accused of carrying fake currencies believed to be used to carryout their activities in India.
"But we now understand the LeT and other such foreign militant groups now do not think Bangladesh to be a good place for their operations in view of a tough government stand... they earlier tried to use Bangladesh land for their operations in neighbouring India," Islam said.
He, however, said that they gathered evidence that the LeT had links with Bangladeshi militant outfits, particularly Harkatul Jihad (HuJI) for their local shelters.
The RAB troops last month had arrested two LeT operatives, five days after police detained the alleged chief operative of the outfit Khurram alias Mohammad Selim along with two Pakistani accomplices.
Security officials, however, have long been saying that the domestic as well as the foreign militants in Bangladesh were now in a dilapidated state under an intensified security campaign.
"I tell you this much now that... they are now in a dilapidated state in view of our coordinated anti-militant campaign (and) in fact LeT now virtually has no activities in the country," senior police officer Hassan Mahmud Khondkar said in October.
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