Govt under pressure to admit IS existence: PM

The prime minister, Sheikh Hasina, on said on Sunday that recent killings and attacks on foreigners, publishers and bloggers were pre-planned and her government was under tremendous pressure to acknowledge that militants of Islamic State existed in Bangladesh.
‘International quarters are involved in the conspiracy and some local people are linked up with them to establish that IS militants exist in this country,’ she said at a press conference briefing at her Ganabhaban residence.
Without naming any country, quarter or people, the prime minister said that they wanted to bring Bangladesh in line with countries like Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Libya.
‘Many quarters are pressing us to admit that IS militants exist in Bangladesh in order to make way for their invasion of Bangladesh like many other countries,’ she said.
She also said that the masterminds and perpetrators of recent killings and attacks had got many other plans for the future to show Bangladesh as an unsafe place.
Hasina, also the ruling Awami League president, rejected Bangladesh Nationalist Party chairperson Khaleda Zia’s call for a national dialogue and said that she had no intention to sit for talks.
She held Khaleda, also former prime minister, responsible for the deaths in arson during anti-government protests marking the first anniversary of January 5 national elections boycotted by all opposition parties. ‘The smell of charred human bodies will come from her [Khaleda] when I will sit beside her,’ said Hasina
‘Bangladesh is not in such a political crisis or sunk in such a dismal state for which we have to sit with such a killer [Khaleda],’ Hasina said.
The prime minister said that she would think about dialogue if Khaleda supported the ongoing trial of war criminals.
The BNP chairperson in the past week in a statement called for a national dialogue to resolve the ‘existing crisis.’
Hasina again alleged that failing to topple the government through subversions and arsons, BNP and Jamaat resorted to secret killings and claimed that the people held for the recent killings were involved in politics of either BNP or Jamaat while they were students.
She also said that the government had gather information that a group of people was supplying money and another group was carrying out the killings and subversions and combing operations had already been launched across the country to nab the trouble makers.
Many incidents are taking place across the world and Bangladesh is also not out of that common phenomenon, Hasina said, mentioning killing incidents in city of the United States and the United Kingdom. Bangladesh is a very much safe place, she said.
They are trying to make issue of insecurity while Bangladesh is prospering economically and living standard of the people is improving, said Hasina.
About Amnesty International’s latest statement on trial of war criminals and allegation against freedom fighters of committing crimes, she said, ‘They [AI] have got a hefty amount of something for which they are making such reports.’
Minister for public administration Syed Ashraful Islam, also the AL general secretary, foreign minister AH Mahmood Ali, state minister for water resources Mohammad Nazrul Islam and state minister for foreign affairs Md Shahriar Alam were present.

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