Explosives used on RAB in Dhaka were made in Chittagong dens, police suspect

The similarities between the explosives found in Comilla, Chittagong and Dhaka have made police suspect that those were assembled in Chittagong militant dens and transported to the capital.

Police busted a militant den in Mirsharai on Mar 8 following information obtained from two suspects arrested during an attack on a security check post in Comilla the previous day.

On Mar 15, a militant couple was detained in a raid on a house at Namar Bazar in Chittagong's Sitakunda. Information given by them led to the raid on another house nearby in Premtala area of the same municipality.

The 19-hour stand-off and raid ended in the morning on Mar 16 with the deaths of two suspects in a suicide blast and two others by the law-enforcers in the final assault.

A huge cache of bombs, explosives and bomb-making materials were also found in the Chittagong hideouts.

Two of those killed during the Premtala raid in Sitakunda were bomb experts of revived radical group Jama'atul Mujahideen Bangladesh (Neo-JMB), police said. The militant dens were being used to make bombs, the law enforcers suspect.

In an apparent reprisal of Chittagong raid and deaths of fellow militants, two suicide attackers tried to attack a RAB camp in Dhaka on Friday.

One militant died in a suicide attack at the elite force's barracks in Dhaka's Ashkona while another was captured during the incident but later died of 'cardiac arrest' in RAB custody. Two RAB personnel were injured in the attack.

On Saturday, another militant armed with explosives was shot dead at a RAB check post in the capital's Khilgaon he tried to run over his motorbike at the checkpoint.

Deputy Inspector General of Police (Chittagong Range) Mohammad Shafiqul Islam has said the law enforcers were checking whether the explosives used in the Dhaka attacks were transported from Chittagong.

"There are similarities between the bombs hurled at police in Comilla and those recovered in Sitakunda," he told bdnews24.com on Sunday.

"And the bombs (used) in Dhaka RAB barracks have similarities with those recovered in Comilla and Sitakunda," said the DIG.

In initial interrogation, the two arrested in Comilla's Chandina after attacking police at a check post stated that they were carrying the bombs from Chittagong to Dhaka. The duo attacked police when the law enforcers stopped their bus at the check post.

DIG Shafiqul said, "They made the bombs in Chittagong and sending those to Dhaka. If it is true, then this can be understood that their target was to use the bombs in the capital."

Following a series of attacks on attacks and murders by suspected Islamist militants between early 2015 and mid-2016, the situation almost normalised amidst law-enforcing agencies' crackdown on militancy after the Gulshan and Sholakia terror attacks in July last year.

The law-enforcing agencies think the militants carried out the attacks on RAB to make their presence known.

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