Bangladesh police arrest 4 Pakistanis, recover bombs, fake currency

Bangladesh police on Saturday claimed they arrested four Pakistanis and 12 others and seized eight crude bombs and 12.9 million in fake Indian currency while the group was allegedly planning subversive activities.

“Other than the Pakistanis, we arrested 12 Bangladeshis including a doctor while carrying out our overnight raids in various parts of the capital,” police spokesman Manirul Islam told reporters.

He said plainclothesmen carried out the raids on a tip-off while they also seized eight crude bombs and a huge amount of counterfeit Indian and Pakistani currencies.

Islam said the four Pakistanis, two of them women, were found to be part of a counterfeit currency clique, who provided the money to Fariduddin Ahmed, a leader of the Jamaat-e-Islami party.

“During initial interrogations they admitted that their counterfeit money was being used to regroup banned militant outfits like Harkatul Jihad-e-Islami (HuJI) and JMB (Jamaatul Mujaheedin) after these groups had been neutralised in the past few years under a massive security clampdown,” Islam said.

Islam said Ahmed was suspected to have masterminded major attacks on banks to use the money for buying weapons for militants.