SYLHET: Bangladeshi security forces laid siege overnight to a house in a northeastern town, where the leader of a militant Islamist group was believed to be hiding up, officials and witnesses said on Wednesday.

Some 500 members of an elite police force had surrounded the two-storeyed house in Sylhet town where Shayek Abdur Rahman, supreme leader of the Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen group, and his associates were believed to be holed up.

Shayek’s group and another radical Islamist organisation, the Jagrata Muslim Janata Bangladesh, have been blamed for a wave of bombings in the impoverished nation since August that have killed 30 people and wounded 150.

Police said security forces might eventually storm the house, in the town’s Tilagarh area, some 400 km from the capital Dhaka, if the militants did not give themselves up.

“We are trying to persuade them to come out. But they seem adamant,” said an officer of the Rapid Action Battalion force.

A Reuters reporter at the scene said the police had made repeated announcements over a loudspeaker, urging the militants to surrender.

Hundreds of people believed to be members of the Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen and the Jagrata Muslim Janata Bangladesh have been detained since the bombings, but Shayek and Jagrata Janata chief Bangla Bhai remain at large.

A Bangladeshi court last month sentenced the two to 40 years imprisonment each for their involvement in a suicide bomb attack in November in which two judges were killed.

The two groups are fighting for introduction of sharia law in Bangladesh, a mainly Muslim democracy.—Reuters