Bangladesh warns of huge terrorist influx into India, says Times of India

Dhaka has warned Delhi of a three-fold rise in the influx of terrorists into the country from Bangladesh, reports the 'Times of India'.

A report has been sent by the Bangladesh government to the Indian home ministry, it says.

The report also said the Bangladesh government has claimed that 2016 saw an over three-fold rise in infiltration by Harkat-ul Jihad al-Islami (HuJI) and Jama'atul Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB) extremists into the border states of West Bengal, Assam and Tripura from 2015.

Officials at the Bangladesh home ministry declined to comment on the report.

The Indian National Investigation Agency (NIA) has found direct JMB involvement in the October 2014 Burdwan blast at Khagragarh, in which two suspected terrorists were killed. Their chargesheet has indicted a number of JMB activists in the case.

The Times of India says the report claimed that as many as 2,010 HuJI and JMB terrorists had entered the three Indian states. Of them, nearly 720 made safe passage through the Bengal border, whereas the remaining 1,290 are suspected to have entered through Assam and Tripura.

Analysis: bdnews24.com India Correspondent

JMB, HuJI and Ansarullah Bangla Team (ABT) terrorists usually take the Sylhet-Barak Valley or the Comilla-Tripura route to enter India and then move on to West Bengal and the rest of the country.

A racket providing them with Indian identity documents, even passports, have mushroomed in Assam's Bengali-dominated Barak Valley.

These terrorists try to find safe shelter and hide it out until they have developed links with Indian jihadists either belonging to their outfits or linked to them.

While the West Bengal government doubts the report, the numbers are quite alarming as the intelligence reports pegged the number of terrorists infiltrating India in 2014 and 2015 at 800 and 659, respectively, it says.

“We are trying to gather information to confirm the veracity of the report,” a senior West Bengal home department official was quoted by the Times of India as saying.

A 19-hour raid on a suspected terror den in Chittagong on Mar 16 ended through an assault which saw the deaths of two militant suspects in a suicide blast and two others shot dead. A child also died in the explosion. bdnews24.com

Meanwhile, additional director-general of police (SB) in Assam, Pallab Bhattcharyya, has expressed his concern.

He admitted that there has been a rise in terrorist activities over the last six months and that the Assam police had already arrested 54 JMB operatives.

It is believed that a top JMB leader Iftadur Rahman entered India on Jan 12 of this year on a fake passport and has established contact with linkmen in Assam and Bengal, says the Times of India.

Intelligence sources have said that he might also visit Delhi, it said.