“We have information that Sohel Mahfuz supplied the grenades used by militants in the Gulshan cafe attack,” Counter-Terrorism and Transnational Crime unit chief Monirul Islam said yesterday. CT unit sources say Mahfuz was a founding member of the JMB, which was formed in 1998 by former Jamaat leader and Ahle Hadith member Shayakh Abdur Rahman and declared banned in 2005. In his student life, Mahfuz was a member of Islami Chhatra Shibir, the radical student wing of Jamaat and later joined the JMB. Later Mahfuz went to Burdwan of India and from there tried to raise a new faction of the JMB with the help of Maulana Abul Kashem, who later became its acting chief. CT unit sources say Mahfuz fled to India and returned home a couple of years ago and started working with the New JMB faction, coordinated by Bangladeshi-born Canadian citizen Tamim Ahmed Chowdhury.

Source: Dhaka Tribune September 02, 2016 19:30 UTC