LeT active in our country, but forces have tracked its network: Bangladesh minister

Dhaka: Bangladesh said on Wednesday that Pakistan-based banned terror group Lashkar-e-Taiba is active in the country but law enforcement agencies have tracked down their network and kept them under "security vigil".

"We have already brought the LeT operatives under security vigil... with the cooperation of people," Bangladesh home minister Muhiuddin Khan Alamgir told reporters after attending a function of police detective school at Rajarbagh Police Lines.

He added, "It is the moral and legal obligation of the government to uproot them totally".

The minister's comment came as Bangladesh witnessed massive street violence during the past one month over the 1971 war crimes trial which convicted fundamentalist Jamaat-e-Islami stalwarts for carrying out atrocities and siding with Pakistani troops.

Law enforcement agencies had earlier said LeT and several other extreme right-wing militant groups were still active in Bangladesh while they used Bangladesh territory mainly for transit to neighbouring India for years together until 2006 but began to gradually lose their strength amid stringent security clampdown.

Earlier media reports said the militant organisations operated almost undisturbed from 1991 to 1998 and then between 2001 and 2006, the periods when ex-prime minister Khaleda Zia's Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) was in power with fundamentalist Jamaat-e-Islami being its crucial ally.

Security officials said some militant groups were generating funds for their operations by selling counterfeit Indian currencies in India while the counterfeit Indian rupees and US dollars were mainly being forged in Pakistan and carried to Bangladesh via Dubai.

LeT issue appeared prominently in media in April 2010 when elite anti-crime Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) said they arrested top LeT organiser as he was operating in Bangladesh in the guise of a businessman while another two Pakistani extremists were arrested last week during street violence triggered by fundamentalist Jamaat-e-Islami.

Police chief Hassan Mahmud Khondkar recently told PTI that "Bangladesh, however, is no more a comfortable place for local or foreign militants any way."