Bangladesh, Blaming Local Groups for Attacks, Seeks Suspects Tied to ISIS





NEW DELHI — Bangladesh, reeling from a sudden intensification of terrorism this summer, has begun an urgent search for men suspected of building an Islamic State presence in the country and recruiting young Bangladeshis to fight in Syria and Iraq.

Bangladesh’s government has maintained that the escalating attacks there were the work of domestic terrorists supported by domestic patrons, and it has dismissed claims of responsibility from groups like the Islamic State and Al Qaeda.

But a list of 10 high-value suspects that was released this month, after the harrowing siege of a restaurant in Dhaka, tells another story.

The list includes three Bangladeshi expatriates — longtime residents of Canada, Australia and Japan — who have long been sought by the police and suspected of setting up training and recruitment pipelines for the Islamic State. A fourth man on the list vanished last year after telling his brother he planned to fight for the Islamic State in Iraq, the police said.

The most talked-about of the suspects, Tamim Ahmed Chowdhury, is believed by some analysts to act as a coordinator of the Islamic State’s activities in Bangladesh and parts of northeast India. No suspects have been arrested because some operated in countries with stronger legal protections, the police said, and others have disappeared.

Until last fall, officials openly discussed fledgling efforts by a handful of Islamic State recruiters to lure Bangladeshis to Turkey, and on to Iraq or Syria. They did not seem to pose an urgent problem for Bangladesh: The number of recruits was not large, believed to be several dozen, and officials had no inkling that they aspired to carry out domestic attacks.

“We have good intelligence about Islamic State supporters,” Monirul Islam, then the joint commissioner of the Dhaka metropolitan police, said in an interview last year. “They have confided that they want to go to Syria and participate in jihad. Not in Bangladesh. Their plan does not include anything like they would kill anyone in Bangladesh.”

He added, though, that “these boys, if they return, that is a potential threat all over the world.”

Now the police are seeking several suspected Islamic State operatives as possible coordinators of domestic terrorism. Among the 10 high-priority suspects are three whom Mr. Islam described last year as Islamic State recruiters.

They are Mr. Chowdhury, who is thought to have returned to Bangladesh from Canada in 2013; Mohammad Saifullah Ojaki, a professor of business administration at a university in kyoto Japan; and Abu Terek Mohammad Tajuddin Kausar, who has lived in Australia for a decade.

A senior intelligence official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak, said the men being sought acted as contact points between militants inside Bangladesh and organizers outside the country.

Mr. Chowdhury, in particular, he said, “is the connection from Bangladesh to Syria.”

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