Chief_Adviser
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Registration date : 2008-06-10
 |  Subject: Steps underway after CNN-IBN report: govt..............  Sat Dec 20, 2008 8:33 pm | |
|  The home secretary has said "preventative measures" were being taken after an Indian television network on Saturday reported that Islamist militants were planning to assassinate Awami League president Sheikh Hasina.
"We have adopted all preventive measures after CNN-IBN's telecast of a plan to assassinate Sheikh Hasina by Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami," home secretray Md Abdul Karim told us Saturday.
But he declined to disclose the measures for "technical" reasons.
Quoting Indian intelligence sources, CNN-IBN had reported that the former prime minister was warned by the Indian intelligence agencies that a six-member suicide squad of the banned Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami Bangladesh or the HuJI had been assigned to kill her.
The report added the HuJI team has trained under the watchful eye of a former Pakistani special forces officer named Ehetesham in a special training camp held at Kaligunj in Satkhira for the last two months.
The six men were personally briefed by HuJI chief Imtiaz Quddus at the end of the training, the report of Atlanta-based CNN's Indian cousin said.
A spokesperson for the Indian high commission in Dhaka said he was not aware of it.
"We have no official comment on this issue," Deepak Mittal, the spokesperson, told us.
He said he came to know about the news from online breaking news service on Saturday.
Awami League spokesperson and joint secretary general Syed Ashraful Islam recently said they had reports that the party chief's life was in danger and sought highest security for her.
He however had not disclosed any specific source to the media.
The government deployed Special Security Force for Hasina and BNP chief Khaleda Zia immediately after the AL demand.
Election commissioner Sakhawat Hussain has also spoke of his apprehension that the Dec. 29 general election could be sabotaged.
But the police and elite anti-crime Rapid Action Battalion ruled out the possibility.
The EC said initially that the army would be called out from Dec. 24 for the election. Later army chief Moeen U Ahmed said the army would be deployed from Dec. 20.
Sakhawat asked the troops to be positioned by Dec. 20 and asked them to start for their assigned posts from Dec 18.
The state of emergency was lifted from Dec. 17.
Jamatul Mujahedin Bangladesh is another banned Islamist organisation, whose 20 activists were detained by the security forces in Nilphamari and Sylhet recently.
HuJI was established in Bangladesh in 1992 with the assistance of International Islamic Front, an organisation of al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden.
A group of top Huji leaders demanded transforming Bangladesh into an Islamic state at a press conference at the National Press Club in Dhaka on April 30, 1992.
The US State Department in a report said that Huji had link with Islamic Oikyo Jote, a political ally of BNP, as well as al-Qaeda.
The US has enlisted Huji as one of the terrorist organisations of the world.
Hasina has survived several assassination attempts in the past. On August 21, 2004, she had a brush with death when a string of explosions rocked an opposition rally she addressed in Dhaka in which 24 people were killed, some 300 injured.
In 2000, 80 kg of RDX was found in the Gopalganj district where Hasina's helicopter was set to land for a political rally. She was the prime minister at that time
In 1988 she came under intense police fire in Chittagong that claimed the life of more than two dozen people.
In August next year a group of gunmen fired at her Dhanmondi residence.
Earlier on several occasions in 1983, 1984, and 1986 she was targeted for assassination.
Her father independence architect Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was also assassinated along with most of his family by renegade army officers on August 15, 1975.
Hasina survived with her only sister Sheikh Rehana as both were was out of the country
HuJI has a history of carrying out violent attacks on secular and progressive intellectuals, writers and journalists in Bangladesh.
Its operations commander Mufti Abdul Hannan was recently convicted as the man behind the 2000 assassination plot of Hasina.
Hannan was remanded in several cases, including the August 17, 2005 countrywide bomb blasts, the 2001 Ramna Batamul blast and the 2004 grenade attack on former British high commissioner Anwar Choudhury in Sylhet. | |
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