More than 100 city-bred boys in Dhaka and much greater numbers of rural youth have been reported missing by their parents in Bangladesh, the country’s information and broadcasting minister, Hasanul Haq Inu, told this newspaper on Saturday.
The missing numbers are possibly indicative of many youth — with similar profiles and age groups as those of the five terrorists who butchered 20 people in an upscale restaurant in Dhaka’s Gulshan area on July 1 — having joined jihadi terror groups.
“We have reports of about 100 missing urban youth from in and around Dhaka while the numbers are much more in the rural areas where parents have come to village police stations to report,” Mr Inu said in a telephonic conversation.
The effort to count the missing numbers began after Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina appealed to parents to inform the police if any of their young children are missing. “We have learned that many college and university students are missing. Don’t just file a GD, give us all the information and photos,” she had said on Thursday. A GD (general diary) is the initial police report.
The July 1 attack terrorists, well educated and some from affluent backgrounds, had been missing for several months.
Terming the case of missing youth as “hype”, Mr Inu said: “It has been blown out of proportion. There are 1.5 crore young Facebook users in Bangladesh out of which 99.9 per cent have condemned the terrorist attacks.”
“Youth joining terrorist ranks is not the general trend in Bangladesh. We are still not like Pakistan or Afghanistan, we remain fundamentally a democratic, secular country,” said the minister, who is also a member of the Ministerial Law and Order Special Committee.
Asked if his government stood by its assertion denying ISIS linkages and that all the Dhaka attackers were home-grown youth, Mr Inu said: “As per reports coming in, and from the interrogation of the arrested terrorists from the Kishoreganj Id attack, there seems to be no organisational link with ISIS or any other international terror outfit.”
Asked about the involvement of others, the minister said: “As of now we are not ruling out anything. We are looking at the ISIS option, the Pakistani connection, linkages to other global terror outfits, the Jamaat-e-Islami, and even Bangladesh Nationalist Party linkages. All are being explored.”
