A senior Bangladeshi minister accused a main opposition party official Wednesday of ordering an Italian aid worker’s murder as part of a plot to destabilise the government.
Bangladeshi Home Minister Asaduzzaman Khan Kamal said police are hunting for Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) official M. A. Quayum for allegedly orchestrating the deadly shooting of Cesare Tavella in the capital late last month.
Police on Monday said four people had been arrested, three of whom they said had admitted carrying out the September 28 contract killing on orders of a so-called “big brother”.
“Quayum is the big brother,” Kamal told reporters on Wednesday.
Quayum, who is believed to have fled the country, is a mid-ranking BNP official and a former Dhaka councillor.
Kamal said police have “conclusive evidence” Quayum ordered the killing as part of a “conspiracy” to trigger anarchy and pile pressure on the government, although he did not elaborate.
The killing near Dhaka’s diplomatic zone was the first of a series of attacks to be claimed by the self-styled Islamic State (IS) and was followed days later by the gunning down of a Japanese farmer in northern Bangladesh.
