DHAKA, Oct 20: Al Qaeda militants fled to Bangladesh from Afghanistan late last year, US magazine Time reported on the weekend, drawing strong denials from officials in Dhaka.

A ship had carried 150 Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters and a huge supply of arms and ammunition from Afghanistan on December 21, 2001, to Bangladesh’s southeastern Chittagong port, Time reported.

Later some of the militants had been transported to Kashmir, territory disputed by India and Pakistan, it said.

“The arrival of a large al Qaeda group...raises pressing concerns that Bangladesh may have become a dangerous new front in America’s war on terror,” the magazine said.

“Indeed, one Bangladeshi newspaper last month even quoted an unnamed foreign embassy in Dhaka as saying Osama bin Laden’s number two, Egyptian Ayman al-Zawahiri, had been hiding out in the country for months after arriving in Chittagong.”

Bangladesh’s government and the country’s biggest Islamic group both said the report, in the Time issue dated October 21, was baseless, fabricated and part of an attempt to portray Bangladesh as a fundamentalist country.

Time quoted an unnamed Bangladesh military intelligence agency official as saying “al-Zawahiri is believed to have left Bangladesh in summer, crossing over the eastern border into Burma with Rohingya (Myanmar Muslim) rebels.”—Reuters