October 16, 2002	Wednesday	Sha’aban 9, 1423

DHAKA, Oct 15: Dhaka on Tuesday blasted claims by Time magazine that groups with links to Al Qaeda have taken root on Bangladeshi soil and that the country could pose a “dangerous new front in America’s ‘war on terror’”.

Foreign Secretary Shamser Mobin Chowdhury said the report was “totally malicious and a figment of wild imagination”.

In its latest issue, US-based Time claimed around 150 members of the Taliban and Al Qaeda who had Afghanistan had arrived by ship in Chittagong last December.

Quoting witnesses, it said the men were wearing black turbans and sporting long beards and arrived ashore at night aboard motor launches from the M.V. Mecca.

They were carrying boxes of ammunition and had AK-47 rifles slung across their shoulders, the Time said, adding that according to a military source, most of the men had remained in Bangladesh.

Quoting sources, the article added that Osama bin Laden’s right-hand man, Ayman al-Zawahiri, had stayed for several months in Bangladesh after arriving through Chittagong, but apparently left again.

Quoting a source in what it called Bangladesh’s “largest Al Qaeda-allied terrorist group Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami”, the report said the men were Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters who had been active in Afghanistan.

It claimed Bangladesh’s southern coastal hills and northern borders with India “are lawless and bristling with Islamic militants”, with the south of the country becoming a “haven for hundreds of jihadis in what they consider a holy war on the lam”.

“The emergence of Al Qaeda in Dhaka is merely the latest sign that Bangladesh’s more radical Islamic groups are coming out of the forests,” the article said.—AFP