Bangladesh Security Update: Attacks on Foreign Nationals
The recent killings of two expatriates in Bangladesh for which the Islamic State (IS) group claimed responsibility has significantly elevated the level of terrorism-related risk in the country.
With a population of 166 million, Bangladesh has been and remains an overwhelmingly moderate Muslim society ruled by an avowedly secular government. Furthermore, its security and intelligence services are both capable and specifically alert to the threat of Islamist terrorism and the potential damage it can wreak on an economy in which the projected growth rate this year is an impressive 6.5 percent.
Nevertheless, the two murders – the first attacks in the country claimed by IS or an IS-affiliated group – come against a backdrop of rising levels of religious intolerance which is spilling over into extremist violence, even as the appeal of IS appears to be gaining traction internationally. This shifting and undeniably more threatening security environment requires that clients with expatriate staff in Bangladesh undertake thorough reviews of procedures and protocols and, where necessary, make changes.
The Attacks
The first killing was that of Italian aid worker Cesare Tavella, 50, a consultant running a food security project for the Dutch development group ICCO (which is backed by Christian churches) who had been living in Bangldesh since May. He was gunned down in the early evening of Monday, 28 September while jogging in Dhaka’s Gulshan diplomat quarter where he lived.
The second killing was that of Japanese investor Kunio Hoshi, 66, who was shot three times on 3 October in a rural area in the northern district of Rangpur, some 300 kilometers from Dhaka where he had invested in a grass cultivation project. Hoshi had been visiting Bangladesh for extended periods each year since 2011.
According to the SITE Intelligence Group, a US monitoring organisation, IS claimed responsibility for both killings on Twitter. In the case of Tavella, a message was released later the same day. IS is not known to take responsibility for attacks it does not do and we view the claims of responsibility for these two attacks as legitimate.
It is also unlikely to have been a coincidence that the murder of Tavella followed intelligence-driven security alerts from western goverments. On Friday 25 September the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs announced that it had “reliable information to suggest that militants may be planning to target Australian interests in Bangladesh.” And on the Monday, just hours before Mr. Tavella’s death, the British government advised its officials in Bangladesh “to limit attendance at events where Westerners may gather.”
Modus Operandi of the Attacks
Both killings reflected a relative degree of professionalism. Police investigators who spoke to our local security source in Dhaka have been in no doubt that both men were specifically targeted and their movements surveilled before their murders: the attacks were in no way random. In both cases the killers operated in teams using motorcycles. Tavella was shot with a pistol from behind at close range by one of three men who approached him on a motorcycle. Hoshi was shot as he rode in a rickshaw by two men at the roadside who then fled on a motorcycle driven by a third man.
This modus operandi suggests strongly that the same group was behind both killings. Indeed it is possible the same hit-team – described in the IS Twitter feed as a “security detachment” – was involved in both attacks. Apparently implicit in the choice of targets was a message that the group has national reach and can operate both in rural and urban areas. This has obviously disturbing implications for foreign non-governmental organisations engaged in development work in Bangladesh’s rural areas, as well as for foreign companies in general operating in the country.
The nature of the two killings also appears to differentiate them from the modus operandi of the two other significant Islamist terrorist groups operating in Bangladesh. One is the Ansarullah Bangla Team (ABT) which is believed by police to have been responsible for the brutal murders of prominent secular bloggers. Beginning in February 2013 with the slaying of pro-democracy activiast Ahmed Rajib Haidar, and continuing into this year, these day-light killings have involved small groups of assailants assaulting victims with knives and machetes. The ABT is understood by police to be a violent off-shoot of the Islami Chhatra Shibir, the youth wing of the Jamaat-e-Islami (JI). Bangladesh’s leading parliamentiary Islamist party, JI, is weak in electoral terms but remains a significant ally of the main opposition party, the Bangladesh National Party (BNP).
The other group involved in Islamist terror is the Jama’at-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB). A home-grown jihadist group founded in 1998, the JMB — which has its roots in the Ahl e Hadith (People of the Traditions of the Prophet) a school of Islam — shot to prominence in August 2005 with a remarkable wave of coordinated bombings across 63 of Bangladesh’s 64 districts. Using small devices in an operation inteded primarily as a propaganad exercise the explosions killed two and wound 104. A focused crackdown in 2007 led to the arrest, trial and execution of the JMB’s top leadership, since when the group has been largely quiescent. It is not, however, an entirely spent force. On 5 October this year a police raid in the southern port city of Chittagong broke up a JMB cell armed with grenades, pistols and bomb-making equipment and resulted in the death of the chief of the group’s military wing, Mohammad Javed.
IS Infiltration in Bangladesh
Notwithstanding its secular traditions, Bangladesh is potentially susceptible to IS infiltration and radicalisation. There are two reasons for this. First, there is significant connectivity with the large Bangladeshi diaspora in the UK where some Muslim youths have been receptive to the IS call to ‘jihad’ in Syria and Iraq. Secondly, IS ideology and the success of the IS ‘brand’ internationally has the potential to inject new fervour into extremist circles in Bangladesh and gain adherents from other groups, notably JMB or ABT.
It remains unclear how many Bangladeshi nationals are currently fighting with IS in Syria and Iraq. What is clear, however, is that there have been significant attempts at local recruitment by the group. In September 2014 police arrested a British citizen of Bangladeshi origin Samiun Rahman. Investigations revealed that Samiun, a former Britrish taxi controler had visited North Africa and Syria before arriving in Bangladesh in Januray 2014 to recruit youth from both Bangladesh and Myanmar for ‘jihad’. Two of his local associates were reportedly affiliated with ABT. Another important IS recruiter and organiser Sakhawatul Kabir was arrested in January this year.
One of our sources in Dhaka who has contacts in the police investigation team has indicated that officers directly involved with the cases believe the killings were undertaken by an Islamist terrorist group. What they do not yet know is whether that group has already well-established links to IS or, alternatively, is composed of IS sympathisers seeking independently to gain prominence by claiming links to the parent group in Syria and Iraq.
The lack of clarity around this issue is further compounded by political agendas currently muddying the investigation. Driven by the bitter polarisation of Bangladeshi politics, this dynamic is already clearly in play. The Awami League (AL) government of Sheihk Hasina Wajeed has from the outset dismissed outright the possibility that IS or IS-inspired elements might be responsible for the killings, denying that IS has any following in the country. It has gone on to link both murders to politicians of the opposition BNP, led by Hasina’s arch-rival Khaleda Zia, purportedly seeking to discredit the achievements of the incumbent administration and destabilise the country.
As summed up by our primary Bangladeshi source: “The investigating officers in both cases still believe that some Islamist terrorist group was responsible for the killings. But the Government is trying to get political advantage from every incident and because of this political pressure, the police are making up stories.”
This does not bode well for the resolution of either case in the short term. More generally, we assess that further low-level terrorist attacks are likely in the coming months. These may not necessarily target foreign nationals, but given the killings of Tavella and Hoshi a worrying precedent has clearly been set.
