Prevent offences of financing terror outfits

Four Bangladeshi NGOs have channelled Tk 73 crore, received in foreign aids, to militant outfits and Jamaat-e-Islami over the last one year, law enforcement agencies have claimed following some recent arrests. On November 8, the Counter Terrorism and Transnational Crime Unit arrested eight people on charges of instigating Rohingya refugees in guise of workers of an NGO, Small Kindness Bangladesh (SKB). All of them were members of Ansar al-Islam, a banned militant outfit formerly known as Ansarullah Bangla Team, said the CTTC officials.
Separately, the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) arrested eight employees of three other NGOs — Bangladesh Chashi Kalyan Samity, Nobo Krishi Private Ltd, and Nobodhara Kalyan Foundation on October 28 for “funding radical groups.” The arrestees gave confessional statements to court that they used the funds of the NGOs for the welfare of Jamaat and extremist groups.
The investigators are now on the lookout for 30 staffers of SKB and 36 staffers of the rest three, they said. CTTC officials said the SKB was providing financial support to the families of Jamaat-Shibir activists and leaders who died during the countrywide shutdowns and blockades in 2013 and 2014. It had funds especially allocated for Jamaat-Shibir activists and leaders behind bars, they said, adding that the money was used to foot the legal expenses to secure their bail.
The CTTC’s data intelligence gathering activities must have improved dramatically for it to figure out all these transnational and intra-national payments, as the movement of funds can be quite complex. It is a matter of credit to the CTTC that they were able to decipher the complex web of fund transfers to catch the perpetrators so easily.
Such an unprecedented scale of investigation shows the depth of the nature of the intelligence capture of our security agencies. It shows that they care capable of decoding global fund transfers, a fact which should help them to figure out those people who remove illicit funds from Bangladesh to park them to foreign countries. These funds are almost always black money, whether earned legally or illegally–getting them back would ensure huge windfall benefits for our country. So the CTTC must expand its scope of investigations to ensure that the world of financial crime is also thoroughly investigated.
We do urge the authorities concerned to take stringent measures, including cancelling registration, against the NGOs for financing terror outfits. At the same time, other local and foreign NGOs should be brought under strict vigilance to prevent such crime in the future.