40 Hifazat men remanded

A Dhaka court has granted remand of 40 Hifazat-e Islam activists for interrogation in police custody.

Md Ismail Hossain of Dhaka Metropolitan Magistrate court sent another 16 Hifazat supporters to jail on Tuesday.

Ramna Police Station officials had produced 20 Hifazat activists, detained under Section 54, in court seeking seven-day remand. The Shahbagh police also produced another 20 Hifazat activists for five-day remand to interrogate them, Dhaka Metropolitan Police’s Additional Deputy Commissioner Mohammad Anisur Rahman said.

Judge Hossain granted two-day remand for each of the detainees after a hearing on Tuesday.

Police detained the Hifazat activists on charges of obstructing security personnel from discharging duties, vandalism and arson during the radical organisation’s Motijheel rally on Sunday.

Formed only a few years ago, the Chittagong-based group found its way to the

centre-stage of Bangladesh politics

amid extraordinary situations. It has been pressing for an anti-blasphemy Act, something the Prime Minister has turned down on the ground that existing laws are enough to try such offences.

During a rally on April 6 the group came out with a controversial

13-point charter of demands

that included scrapping the national women’s policy, the current education system, which they say is ‘godless’, and banning public mixing of sexes.

Widely believed to be funded and guided by the Jamaat-e-Islami, the group came to prominence by opposing the Ganajagaran Mancha, a secular platform pressing for maximum penalty for convicted war criminals and banning the Jamaat.

Dubbing the Mancha organisers as ‘atheists’, it demanded that they be punished for defaming Islam and Prophet Muhammad.

Several top leaders of Jamaat, the party which opposed the nation’s struggle for freedom, are facing trial on a wide range of crimes charges perpetrated during the 1971 Liberation War. Two of the leaders have already been convicted.

BNP, Jamaat’s key ally, lent support to the Hifazat’s rally. Party chief Khaleda Zia, on Saturday had urged her party supporters to stand by the radical group’s activists.

Information Minister Hasanul Haq Inu and State Minister for Home Shamsul Hoque Tuku have said the government would take actions against those who had lent support to the Hifazat activists.