Bangladesh Groups Plotting Attacks in India: Intel Report

Operatives of two Bangladeshi militant groups have infiltrated India and together are plotting attacks in major cities including the Indian capital, according to a classified intelligence report accessed by BenarNews.

Members of the Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB) and Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami (HuJI) extremist groups crossed the border into northeast India, and have formed a joint team that is planning a series of attacks, the report said.

“[T]he secretary of JMB, Iftadur Rehman, has entered India on Jan. 12 on [a] fake passport and has established contact with linkmen in Assam and West Bengal. He is also scheduled to visit Delhi,” said the report, which cited inputs from intelligence sources.

“There are reports that the combined team of [JMB and HuJI] is planning big attacks in major centers in India,” it added.

Iftadur Rehman, whose real name is Sajjad Hussain, is a native of Moulvibazar in northeast Bangladesh, a senior official of India’s Border Security Force (BSF), told BenarNews.

“We have credible information that on Jan. 18, a meeting between linkmen from Assam, West Bengal and New Delhi and top JMB and HuJI leadership has taken place in the Mymensingh district of Bangladesh,” the official said, adding that authorities in New Delhi had already been informed of the developments.

Key members of JMB and HuJI met in the Bangaon area of Bangladesh’s Sylhet district on Jan. 24 to chalk out plans for attacks in India, the report said. Officials of Pakistan’s external intelligence agency ISI were also present at this meeting, it added.

HuJI is an Islamist fundamentalist organization most active in Bangladesh and Pakistan since the late 1980s. The group was banned in Bangladesh in 2005. And Bangladeshi officials have blamed a faction of the JMB, called Neo-JMB, for a terrorist attack that killed 20 hostages at a café in Dhaka in July 2016.

Indian national Mohammad Mosihuddin (alias Abu Musa), a suspected IS operative who was arrested in West Bengal just days after the attack on the Holey Artisan Bakery café, told counter-terror interrogators that he was asked to set up an IS cell in India by Abu Suleiman, a JMB operative allegedly linked to the café siege, an official with India’s National Investigation Agency told BenarNews last year.

NIA officials also said JMB was affiliated with Islamic State (IS), but Bangladeshi officials have consistently denied that the Middle East-based terror outfit has a presence in their country.