Dhaka, Bangladesh – Safety officers in Bangladesh arrested the chief of a Rohingya insurgent group on expenses of unlawful entry, sabotage and terrorist actions within the South Asian nation, the place there are greater than 1 million Rohingya refugees from neighboring Myanmar.
Police mentioned {that a} staff of the Fast Motion Battalion arrested Ataullah Abu Ammar Jununi, generally known as the commander-in-chief of Arakan Rohingya Salvation Military in a raid Tuesday in Narayanganj district close to the capital, Dhaka.
Jununi, a Pakistani-born Rohingya who grew up in Mecca, leads a bunch that has performed assaults on officers in Myanmar as a part of what it describes as “a defensive warfare with the brutal Burmese navy regime” on behalf of the Rohingya, who face discrimination and violence in Myanmar.
Bangladeshi intelligence says ARSA members have been concerned in focused killings, kidnappings, illicit medicine, smuggling and different critical crimes within the Rohingya refugee camps. Infighting and retaliatory assaults over management of the camps led to deaths of a whole lot of Rohingya.
Bangladesh’s Every day Star reported that 10 different group members, together with 4 kids and girls, have been additionally arrested in separate raids in Narayanganj and Mymensingh districts.
Shahinur Alam, a senior police official at Siddhirganj in Narayanganj, advised reporters that the officers additionally seized money, a knife, a pointy metal chain and 4 wristwatches through the raid.
A Justice of the Peace in a while Tuesday licensed police to carry Jununi and 6 others for interrogation. 4 others have been despatched to jail.
Additional particulars on how Jununi got here to Bangladesh and the way he stayed within the nation remained unclear.
ARSA was fashioned in 2016 by Rohingya exiles residing in Saudi Arabia, in accordance with the Worldwide Disaster Group, and is led by Jununi and a committee of about 20 Rohingya emigres. ICG says there are indications Jununi and others obtained militant coaching in Pakistan and probably Afghanistan.
Successive governments in predominantly Buddhist Myanmar have denied the Rohingya primary rights and citizenship, deeming most of them to be overseas invaders from Bangladesh, regardless that Rohingya have lived in Myanmar for generations.
For many years, Bangladesh has sheltered greater than 1 million Rohingya refugees, together with greater than 700,000 who crossed the border into Bangladesh in 2017 when Myanmar launched a violent clearance operation in its Rakhine state. One other 70,000 arrived in Bangladesh final yr whereas 1000’s of recent infants are born yearly in dozens of sprawling camps within the nation.
The state of affairs in Myanmar has remained unstable after one other group — Arakan Army — took management over the Rakhine state from the place Rohingya refugees arrived in Bangladesh.