Captured Bangladeshi said to admit to bombings

Dhaka, Mar 10: One of Bangladesh's top Islamist militants, captured last week, has confessed to involvement in a wave of bomb attacks that killed at least 30 people, a senior officer of the Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) force today (Mar 10, 2006).

zaruddin Ahmed, intelligence chief of the elite RAB, said Shayek Abdur Rahman, now in police custody and being interrogated by a joint task force, had admitted that his outlawed Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen group was mainly responsible for the explosion of hundreds of small bombs since August 2005.

At least 30 people were killed and over 150 wounded in the attacks, which created panic across the country.

Shayek, supreme leader of the Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen, was captured in the northeastern town of Sylhet on March 2 following a siege of the house where he lived with his family.

Formal charges against Shayek, which may include sedition and murder, will be laid later, officials said. He could face the death penalty if convicted.

Shayek has already been sentenced to 40 years in prison while in hiding for his role in the killing of two judges in January in southern Jhalakathi town.

Last Monday, another of Bangladesh's most wanted militants, Siddikul Islam Bangla Bhai, was captured during a gunbattle in the northern district of Mymensingh.

Wounded in the battle, Bangla Bhai, chief of another outlawed group called Jagrata Muslim Janata Bangladesh, is now being treated at an armed forces hospital in Dhaka.

Security officials said today his condition was improving and he would be fit for questioning in a few days.

The two groups are fighting for introduction of sharia law in Bangladesh, a mainly Muslim democracy.

The capture of the two top militants came as a welcome relief to the government, but analysts said there was a way to go to crush the militant Islamic movement.

Some 1,000 suspected members of the two groups are now in police custody but thousands more are still in hiding, they said.

REUTERS