DHAKA: More than
100,000 clerics and preachers rallied in the Bangladeshi capital
against Islamist
extremism on Thursday after a resurgence of attacks by militant groups in the Muslim-majority nation.
Organisers said the
rally was staged to protest a violent "power grab" in the name of Islam in
Muslim majority Bangladesh, where a rise in Islamist
extremism has sparked international concern.
The
rally followed suicide attacks on Bangladeshi security forces that sparked a ****** of raids in which nearly two dozen suspected extremists were killed.
Police said Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina addressed more than
100,000 clerics in a park in central Dhaka where two top Saudi Arabian
clerics delivered sermons
against extremism.
"There is ** place for terror and
extremism in Islam," Shaikh Mohammed bin Naser Al Khujaim, a senior cleric from Makkah, told the rally.
"Muslims across the world must stand firm
against this terror and extremism."
Dhaka police shut down major roads leading to the park and asked people to avoid busy shopping malls as they stepped up security for the rally.
Analysts say Islamist militants pose a growing danger in conservative Bangladesh, where a long-running political crisis has radicalised opponents of the government.
Hasina’s government has blamed the Jamayetul Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB), a banned Islamist group, for a wave of deadly attacks
against religious mi**rities and foreigners.
Many, including last year’s attack on an upmarket cafe in Dhaka in which 22 people including 18 foreign hostages were killed, have also been claimed by the Islamic State group.
The relative lull which followed that attack was broken recently by twin blasts in the **rtheastern city of Sylhet where army commandos had stormed a suspected militant hideout.
The explosions fatally injured the intelligence chief of the Rapid Action Battalion -- the elite force at the forefront of the fight
against Islamist militancy -- dealing a major blow to the security forces.
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