Bangla activists held for ISIS propaganda

The police have detained two members of Bangladesh’s biggest religion-based party on suspicion they were involved in ISIS propaganda, including one who called himself “Jihadi John”, a police commissioner said on Wednesday.

The two members of the Jamaat-e-Islami Party, who were paraded before reporters, are being investigated for links with ISIS, which has claimed responsibility for a series of attacks in Bangladesh including the killing of two foreigners.

Nahid Hasan was picked up from Dhaka overnight on suspicion that he was spreading hate and violence on behalf of ISIS using the pseudonym Jihadi John on a Facebook page, police joint commissioner Monirul Islam said.

“We are verifying whether he actually had contacts with the radical group,” Mr Islam said.

The government has consistently denied that ISIS has a presence in the country and instead blamed religious groups such as the Jamaat for instigating violence in the predominantly Muslim, but secular nation of 160 million people.

The police said the second man, former teacher Abdul Haque, arrested in the overnight raid was believed be behind text messages threatening writers and university teachers who have been targeted by unknown assailants in 2015.

“He sent death threats via telephone and text messages using a fake IS (ISIS) identity,” Mr Islam said, adding that prominent secular intellectual Anisuzzaman, historian Muntasir Mamun and writer Mohammed Zafar Iqbal were among the targets.

The police have stepped up a search for those behind the threats as well as security of those targeted after a hitlist was published on the Internet of 153 names.

Tensions have been rising in over the trials of Islamists for war crimes during its struggle for independence in 1971 and some leaders of the Jamaat as well the BNP, have been executed. Critics say the government is using the war trials to settle political scores.