INDIA: Police have interrogated scores of detainees and beefed up security patrols across Bangladesh after serial bombings, linked to Muslim extremists, rocked 64 of the country's 65 districts. Two people were killed and 125 others were injured last Wednesday.
Police in Bangladesh's capital Dhaka claim to have apprehended, along with about 100 others, a madrassa or Islamic seminary student found with a video of Osama bin Laden's speeches and military training manuals.
Several other detainees were students or teachers from madrassas after about 350 small home-made bombs exploded on Wednesday outside government offices, courts, hotels and bus and railway stations in almost every major town and city in Bangladesh.
The explosive devices were detonated within an hour of each other, triggering widespread panic and chillingly indicating the perpetrators' organisational skills. Security officials said they were meant to cause terror, not kill.
Bangladesh's Islamist-allied coalition government has consistently maintained that it does not have a problem with Muslim extremists despite concerns expressed by the country's opposition, by India and by various western governments.
In February it banned two extremist Islamic groups including Jamayetul Mujahideen which police suspect of being linked to Wednesday's bombings even though nobody has admitted responsibility.
Leaflets bearing the group's name which called for the installation of Islamic law and rejection of democratically elected governments, in a country governed by secular principles, were recovered at all the blast sites.
The proscribed organisation threatened to "start total implementation of a killing system ordered by Allah" if its demands were not met. Some leaflets also warned Britain and the US to "vacate all Muslim countries".
"Already the Jamayetul Mujahideen have called on the government twice to establish Islamic government. This is the third call to the government. If after this call, the government does not establish Islamic government . . . Jamayetul Mujahideen Bangladesh will take action," the leaflets warned.
Analysts say Islamic fundamentalism has proliferated in Bangladesh after the four-party right-wing ruling alliance led by Begum Zia's Bangladesh National Party assumed power in October 2001 following a bitterly contested and violent election.
Extremist parties such as those in government decree that Islam is not only a way of life but a complete system of politics, economics and culture, incompatible with western secular democracy. Their emergence has led to warnings of the "Talibanisation" of Bangladeshi society and a questioning of their "hidden agendas".