Eye to eye with terror in Bangladesh

TERROR HUB: Syed Hasan Ali, a former commander of Harkat-ul-jehad-al-Islami was trained as a suicide bomber.

      

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• Bangladesh, a nation in crisis

Keywords: Khaleda Zia, Sheikh Hasina

Liberated from Pakistan 36-years back in 1971, Bangladesh today stands at the crossroads of democracy and military rule. Will democracy make a come back here, or is the army going to run the entire show? CNN-IBN correspondent Sumon Chakraborty traveled inside Bangladesh’s most hideous corners to find an answer.

Chittagong port of Bangladesh—one of the main routes of arm smuggling in the whole of south Asia—has over the past six-years, emerged as the hub of Islamic radicals in the country.

Groups like the Harkat-ul-Jehad-al Islami and Jamait-al-Mujahiddin are headquartered here. We caught up with a former member of the HUJI, who revealed how Bangladesh is emerging as a terror hub in South Asia.

Syed Hasan Ali, a former zonal commander with the Harkat-ul-jehad-al-Islami in Chittagong said he was trained as a suicide bomber. He now lives in exile on fears that the militants who were trained by him, might turn their guns on now that he has left HUJI behind.

“They don't know what jihad is all about. All that they know is to kill people. Their leaders want to implement what they learnt in Afghanistan and Pakistan,” he says.

Since the formation of Bangladesh, a country that achieved its liberation through one of the bloodiest civil wars in human history, the country today fosters and nurtures radical Islam. Religious fanaticism has grown manifold in the last six years of Khaleda Zia led Islamist coalition.

A former schoolteacher Bangla Bhai was another notorious criminal who globally signified the rise of terror groups in Bangladesh. He was later caught and hanged to death. But the merchants of terror are still at large. The recent serial blast across 3 major railway stations in the country proved yet again how active the militants are across Bangladesh.

"HUJI has a huge arms and ammunition depot in the Chittagong hill track. When I left the organization there were about 12,000 armed jehadis and 30,000 more were being inducted as Mujahidins,” said Hasan Ali, the former HUJI militant.