 "Bangladesh arrests Myanmar’s Rohingya leader, head of ARSA, under anti-terrorism law")
Bangladesh arrested 10 operatives of Myanmar’s Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA), including the top leader of the insurgent group, in overnight raids on the outskirts of the capital and northern Mymensingh district, officials said on Tuesday.
“We arrested ARSA chief Ataullah Abu Ammar Jununi alias Ataullah and nine others related to the outfit in separate raids in Narayamhanj (river port town on the capital’s outskirts) and Mymensingh in the past two days,” an official of police’s elite anti-crime Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) said.
He said ARSA was believed to be hatching plots to carry out sabotage in Bangladesh territory and seized from them taka 2.1 million in cash. He added that the RAB teams carried out the raids based on confidential information and filed police cases under Bangladesh’s Anti-Terrorism Act and for their “illegal entry” into the country.
The mass circulation Prothom Alo newspaper said Ataullah had ordered the murder of Rohingya peace activist Mohib Ullah in 2021 inside a Rohingya camp and a key-accused of the murder of Directorate General of Forces Intelligence (DGFI) official Squadron Leader Rizwan Rushdi in southeastern Cox’s Bazar.
Police on Tuesday brought the ARSA leaders and operatives to a Narayanganj court with a petition seeking six of them to be remanded in custody for 20 days while the court granted police 10 days for interrogation.
Police said they did not seek remand for the other four since they were women and children.
According to an International Crisis Group report, Ataullah was born in Pakistan and grew up in Saudi Arabia while apart from Myanmar, Malaysia declared his ARSA a terrorist group.
Impact Shorts
More ShortsOver 1.3 million Rohingyas took refuge in Bangladesh to evade persecution by Myanmar military in 2017 while over 70,000 of them intruded Bangladesh in recent months in view of the clash between government troops and rebel Arakan Army at their homeland in Rakhine state of the country.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by Firstpost staff.)
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