PM warns against harassment of innocent people

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Prime minister Sheikh Hasina has warned the authorities concerned against harassment of innocent people during the ongoing anti-militancy drives by police across the country.
‘The prime minister has directed us to make sure that no one is harassed unnecessarily during the countrywide anti-militant operations,’ home affairs minister Asaduzzaman Khan said on Tuesday.
He told New Age that the police had accordingly been warned against such allegations of blanket arrests during the weeklong combing operations aimed at hunting down militants.
A total of 11,684 people, including 145 suspected militants, were arrested in the capital and districts in four days of the drive till Tuesday morning. Most of the militancy suspects are members of banned Islamist outfit Jamaat-ul Mujahideen Bangladesh.
The police on Friday morning launched the crackdown on extremists after a spate of brutal murders including that of a senior police officer’s wife, in recent months.
Such a big number of arrestees during the crackdown on militants suspected to have links with most of the recent targeted killings would give a wrong message to the international community, the home minister hinted.
The minister said he had conveyed the prime minister’s directives to the inspector general of police in the wake of widespread criticism against allegations of wholesale arrests during the countrywide operations against militant operatives.
About the arrests of so many people at a time, the minister said the IGP had told him that there were arrest warrants against many of those arrested during the special drives.
The main opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party has alleged that the crackdown was a strategy of the government of Sheikh Hasina to suppress the ‘people’s movement’.
Over 2,200 BNP leaders and activists have been arrested so far, the party chairperson Khaleda Zia alleged on Tuesday evening.
‘We fear they will again oppress the opposition in the name of conducting the crackdown,’ BNP secretary general Mirza Fakhrul Islam Alamgir had earlier said.
Families of many victims claimed that police had arrested their relatives although they had no criminal records.
They alleged that many innocent people had just become victims of the blanket arrests across the country.

Source: New Age