Police arrest Indian militant leader

BSS, Dhaka

Detective policemen arrested a wanted Indian militant leader, believed to be linked to Harkatul Jihad al Islami (HuJI) and Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Toiba and India's Asif Reza Commando Force (ARCF).
"We arrested Mufty Obaidullah after one and half months of manhunt in line with statements of earlier arrested Indian underworld operative Dawdood merchant," Dhaka's police commissioner AKM Shahidul Hoque told a press conference here on Friday.
He added that according to the initial interrogation Afghan resistance veteran Obaidullah said, he was hiding in Bangladesh since 1995 as a madrasah teacher to evade arrests by Indian security forces and in the past 14 years he served in four madrasahs with the last one being in western Madaripur.
Haque said, police launched a manhunt for four other absconding Indian nationals, in line with initial statements of Obailullah, a graduate of India's Deoband Madrasah.
The police commissioner said, they were yet to find the links between Dawdood Ibrahim's underworld network and the extreme right wing militant outfits despite their apparent dissimilarities in terms of ideology or objectives.
But, a police official familiar with the process earlier said, Obaidullah was an operative of ARCF, which had claimed responsibility for the terrorist attack on the American Centre in Kolkata in 2002.