Britain exports extremism to Bangladesh: Economist

British weekly news-magazine The Economist reported that Britain has been exporting Islamist extremism to Bangladesh.

In a recent article titled "Radicalisation in reverse: How Britain exports Islamist extremism to Bangladesh", The Economist portrayed the issue in detail.

The article mentioned that top officials from Bangladesh has been blaming British citizens for their involvement in the planning, funding and promotion of terrorism in the country. It said that in 2015, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina complained to her then counterpart David Cameron, that British citizens were promoting radicalism in her country.

But how the political rhetoric changed gradually in several decades that once Britain used to complain about the influence of foreign radicals, now it is the target of the same complaint?

"Since the first wave of Bangladeshi migrants arrived in Britain in the 1970s, foreign-born preachers have held sway in the community. For a while, the most visible consequence to outsiders was when Bangladeshi restaurants stopped selling alcohol after conservative clerics such as Delwar Hossain Sayeedi came to preach temperance to the diaspora in the 1990s," The article reads.

But the current changed its direction suddenly, The Economist says, with the emergence of Syed Golam Maula, the founder of the Bangladeshi chapter of Hizb-ut-Tahrir, who was introduced to the organization while studying in London in the early 1990s.

According to the magazine, a series of incidents were found with the involvement of several British citizens in the Islamist extremism scene of Bangladesh.

The current of extremism touched its peak soon after 2013 when religious extremists targeted gay activists, atheist bloggers and religious minorities.

The Economist mentioned that Touhidur Rahman, a Briton of Bangladeshi origin, was accused of planning the murder of two secular bloggers.

It also mentioned Rizwan Haroon, who was arrested on suspicion of using a school in Dhaka to recruit youngsters to the so-called Islamic State (IS). He was previously lived in Britain and currently awaiting trial in Bangladesh.

According to America's Federal Bureau of Investigate (FBI) report, one of the leading figures of IS to collect money from overseas countries for the terrorist sect was Siful Haque Sujan, a Bangladeshi-born British citizen believed to have been killed in Syria in 2015.

The article reported that a now-defunct British charity Green Crescent "was connected by Bangladeshi security services to the Holey Bakery attack. In 2009 Bangladeshi forces raided a madrassa funded by Green Crescent and found weapons and extremist literature. They claim the charity's British founder, Faisal Mostafa, has links to Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen, a terrorist outfit, which he denies."

The article traced the new current of British-Bangladeshis involvement in extremism with the rise of Islamic State. It says, "perhaps 100 of the 800 or so Britons who have joined IS are of Bangladeshi origin."

The Economist reported that the practice of torture and extra-judicial killing by Bangladeshi security forces a major barrier for the co-operation between the two countries to counter terrorism.