Bangladesh made its first arrests over an Italian aid worker’s murder as authorities yesterday said the killing was a plot by the government’s opponents to trigger anarchy and not the work of the Islamic State group.
Police paraded four people detained over last month’s killing of 50-year-old Cesare Tavella, along with a motorbike said to have been used as a getaway vehicle in the shooting in Dhaka.
The killing near the capital’s diplomatic zone was the first of a series of attacks to be claimed by the Islamic State group and was followed days later by the gunning down of a Japanese farmer in northern Bangladesh.
Photo: AFP
A weekend bombing of the main Shiite shrine in Dhaka, which killed one person and wounded dozens more, has further heightened the fears of minorities living in the mainly Muslim, but officially secular nation.
Although that attack was also claimed by the Islamic State group, the government on Sunday denied the group is active in Bangladesh and instead rounded up dozens of Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s opponents.
Speaking after the four suspects were brought before the media, Dhaka police said they had all admitted killing Tavella on “the orders of a so-called big brother who offered them money.”
“They carried out the murder to embarrass the government, to put the government under pressure and to create anarchy,” Dhaka Police Commissioner Asaduzzaman Mia told reporters. “So far what they have admitted to us is that they were not specifically targeting Cesare Tavella, but their aim [was to] kill any white-skinned foreigner.”
“Their big brother wanted to prove that Bangladesh is not safe for foreigners... If they could prove that, then it would put pressure on the government,” Mia said.
Police described two of the suspects as drug addicts who have previous criminal convictions, while another is said to be a drug-dealer and the fourth “a cold-blooded killer.”
They did not elaborate on the identity of the “big brother” said to have ordered the killing of Tavella, who worked for a faith-based Dutch charity.
However, Mia insisted it could not have been carried out by the Islamic State group or another extremist group behind the recent killings of atheist bloggers.
“There is no militant connection with this killing. This is entirely a local group that wants to make political capital,” he said.
His comments echoed those of Bangladeshi Minister of Home Affairs Asaduzzaman Khan Kamal, who told reporters after the shrine blast that “the Islamic State organization does not exist in Bangladesh.”
Hasina and her allies have consistently blamed the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) and its main Islamic ally, Jamaat-e-Islami, for recent unrest, and the attacks on foreigners and religious minorities. After the attack on the Shiite shrine, a former BNP lawmaker in Dhaka and several senior officials from both parties were detained.
Although police said the arrests were related to previous unrest and not linked to Saturday’s blast, the BNP said the government was clearly using the heightened state of anxiety as a pretext to crack down on opponents.
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