Islamic fundamentalist groups, including some with possible ties to the al Qaeda, are gaining strength in areas of Bangladesh bordering India, a US daily claimed on Monday.
"Bangladesh is becoming increasingly important to groups like the al Qaeda because it has been off everyone's radar screen," an investigative article published in The New York Times quoting an expert, Zachary Abuza, as saying.
"Al Qaeda is going to have to figure out where it can regroup, where it has the physical capability to assemble, and Bangladesh is one of these key places," the report said, quoting Abuza.
The report said last spring in Chittagong police captured 10 truckloads of weapons -- the largest arms seizure in Bangladesh's history.
"The tip-off most likely came from Indian intelligence, which monitors the arms being sent to Islamist separatist groups in India's northeast," it claimed.
Bangladesh has repeatedly denied presence of militant camps on its territory. However, the report said the government has little control over the fundamentalist groups in the Indo-Bangladesh border.
The report also claimed Islamist militants had carried out most attacks against members of other religious minorities, including Hindus, Christians, Buddhists and even moderate Muslims considered not adhering to the doctrines espoused at madrasas.
"For the Hindus, the last couple of years have been disastrous," the article quoted Ali Dayan Hasan of Human Rights Watch as saying.
"There are substantial elements within the society and the government that are advancing the idea that Hindus need to be expelled," he added.
The report said a man who waged 'jihad' in Afghanistan and now settled in Bangladesh's border areas has formed a group called 'Jagrata Muslim Janata Bangladesh' (Awakened Muslim Masses of Bangladesh), which wanted to bring Taliban-type fundamentalist regime in the country.
The man, known as 'Bangla Bhai', is 'determined and violent' and seems to have enough men - perhaps 10,000 lightly armed adherents - to make his rule stick.
He identified himself as Azizur Rahman and more recently as Siddqui Islam. He wants men to sport beards and women to wear burkhas in a place that is religiously diverse, the article noted.
His sworn enemy, the article said, was a 'somewhat derelict but still dangerous group of Leftist marauders', known as the Purbo Banglar Communist Party.
Bangla Bhai's group has tortured its opponents, often by hanging them upside down from trees and beating them with iron rods, and even executed people, the report stated.
The madrasas in the villages are said to be getting money not only from al Qaeda but also from Saudi Arabia. Arms are coming to these areas from Libya and Saudi Arabia, among other sources, the report said.
Though the Bangladesh government, worried that Bangla Bhai's band might be getting out of control, ordered his arrest in late May, it did not make any difference except that he now refrains from public appearances. Even policemen in uniform attend his meetings, the report claimed.
The global war on terror was aimed at making the rise of regimes like the Taliban impossible, but in Bangladesh the trend could be going the other way, the report remarked.
The border provinces have, since independence, harbored many armed groups. By the early 1990's, Islamist groups from the nation began appearing, mainly at the periphery of the jihad in Afghanistan, the article said.
The most important of these has been the Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islam. But 'Bangla Bhai's' group and others have since emerged and are making their bid for power, the article said.
Six years ago, HUJI targeted Bangladesh's leading poet Shamsur Rahman. This resulted in the arrest of 44 members. Two men, a Pakistani and a South African, claimed they had been sent to Bangladesh by Osama bin Laden with over $ 300,000, which they distributed to 421 madrasas.
But, according to the report, Gowher Rizvi, director of the Ash Institute for Democratic Governance and Innovation at Harvard, said bin Laden's reported donation was 'a pittance' compared to the millions that Saudi charities had contributed to many of Bangladesh's estimated 64,000 madrasas.
Money of this kind is especially important because Bangladesh is one of the poorest countries in the world.
In 'Bangla Bhai's' turf in northwestern Bangladesh, poverty is pervasive, the report said.
For the past several years, money from Persian Gulf states has strengthened the fundamentalist groups even more.
The permissiveness of at least some within the government and the police in allowing violent groups like that of Bangla Bhai's to pursue their agendas has only increased the political legitimacy of such groups, the report added.
