Detectives said that they had found no militant involvement with the letter sent to DU VC’s office on Tuesday that threatened to kill 25 noted personalities.
“We suspect that a group or a person, targeting some people, are sending these letters only to scare people,” Monirul Islam, joint commissioner of police’s Detective Branch (DB), told the Dhaka Tribune yesterday.
Over the last one month or so, a total of three such letters had been sent to eminent personalities, mostly known for their secular positions, under the name of the recently-banned militant outfit Ansarullah Bangla Team.
Those letter had separate hit-lists that featured politicians, cultural activists, journalists and war crimes trial campaigners. Some names were included in multiple lists.
The first of these letter were issued on May 21 and the last on Tuesday, June 17. Several diaries had been filed with various police stations in Dhaka soon after these letters came out.
DB chief Monirul Islam, who has been working on militant activities for a while now, said that they had never found any links with international terrorist group al-Qaeda who Ansarullah says is one of their ideological partners.
“Basically, we have seen that if Ansarullah wants to kill anybody, they would not give death threats like this. We have seen before that give threats on the internet as all of their members are tech savvy. But these letters are a totally new thing,” Monirul said.
“Ansarullah targeted those people that are against them or whose statements go against them. We have not seen them send such letters to alert the targeted person.”
These letters come months after the brutal killings of secular activists and science writers Avijit Roy, Oyashiqur Rahman Babu and Ananta Bijoy Das, who were killed from February to April this year. Ansarullah claimed responsibility of all these murders.
Police have not yet managed to trace the senders of any of those letters; they said investigations were going on.
Source: Dhaka Tribune