Report: Bangladeshis Intermingled With Migrant Caravan From Guatemala

Report: Bangladeshis Intermingled With Migrant Caravan From Guatemala

The Daily Caller has reported that Univision correspondent Santa Anna, a reporter traveling with the migrant caravan that’s moving into Mexico from Guatemala, noticed people from Bangladesh within the massive crowd of migrants:

“Yesterday when we were traveling through Guatemala, we noticed people from El Salvador and even people from Bangladesh,” he continued. “Can you imagine what they had to do to get here? They infiltrated themselves in this caravan and tried to cross with the crowd. That would have benefited them greatly.”

Bangladesh remains a hot spot for ISIS and other terrorist groups.

Univision Reporter Embedded With Caravan Says He Has Met Migrants From Known Terrorist Hotspot Secretly Traveling With Them

WOWhttps://t.co/VnMKCTA2od pic.twitter.com/8ixlmAhKF0

— Benny (@bennyjohnson) October 22, 2018

The Daily Caller added:

The Bangladeshis, he said, were detained in an immigration facility, though it’s not clear what happened to them after their detention. (RELATED:Train Of Central American Migrants Swells In Number Despite Warnings From Trump)

“The borders in Central American are not as strong as the U.S., which makes it possible for people from Panama and Ecuador to cross easily,” Santa Anna said on Univision. “They cross from Costa Rica, then later go through Guatemala and eventually make it into our country.”

As I noted earlier today, the caravan has increased in size to over 5,000 people. They have broken barriers between Guatemala and Mexico while thousands more have either swam or rafted across the water to escape detection from officials.

This news comes a few days after Guatemalan President Jimmy Morales announced the country arrested “close to 100 people completely linked to terrorist issues, with ISIS and that not only have we arrested them within our territory, but they have been deported to their countries of origin.”

I only mention this because I remember my time at covering national security at Breitbart and Bangladesh came up quite a few times in news about ISIS and terrorism.

“In Bangladesh in recent years ISIS has taken responsibility for attacks on foreigners, homosexuals, Shia, Ahmadis, Sufis, and other religious minorities, among other groups. Islamist militants have targeted secular writers and bloggers in particular, with an online “hit list.”

— Benny (@bennyjohnson) October 22, 2018

CNN highlighted the growing ISIS threats in Bangladesh back in 2016:

It is also home to almost 150 million Muslims, and up until recently steered clear of the kind of radicalism that has plagued other parts of the world. But unfortunately there are ominous signs that this is changing.

For more than two years, a spate of brutal murders has rocked the South Asian nation. At first the killings had a clear pattern, targeting well-known secular writers in the capital, Dhaka. The attacks seemed designed to silence those who dared to criticize Islam.

One of the most high-profile of these — the murder of the Bangladeshi-American writer Avijit Roy in 2014 — took place right outside Dhaka’s annual book fair.

Then in April this year, a well-known LGBT activist and his friend were murdered while they were at home.

A month later after that expose, CNN wrote that an ISIS attack in Bangladesh showed that ISIS expanded its reach into Bangladesh and Asia as the group tried to compete with al-Qaeda:

Bangladesh has seen growing Islamist militancy since 2013, in reaction to a crackdown by the secular government against the main Islamist party — the Jamaat e Islami. Four of its leading figures have been executed for crimes allegedly committed during Bangladesh’s war of independence from Pakistan in 1971.

That militancy has led to the murders of secular bloggers and gay rights activists, as well as Hindu priests, over the past two years. Many of those attacks have been claimed by a group called Ansar al Islam, the Bangladesh part of AQIS.

By comparison, attacks attributed to ISIS sympathizers have targeted foreigners. In late 2015, ISIS claimed that its gunmen — “Soldiers of the Caliphate in Bangladesh” — were behind the murders of an Italian aid worker and Japanese citizen in Bangladesh.

Like those killings, the Dhaka attack appears to have been carried out by Bangladeshis. But it was far more ambitious and ISIS — at some level – appears to have had foreknowledge of the plan. The sole surviving attacker may provide greater detail about that relationship, but equally the assailants may have been foot soldiers, with communication carried out at a higher level.

No it has not quieted down in Bangladesh. In March of this year, a Bangladesh court sentenced seven militants belonging to Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen, an ISIS-linked terrorist group based in the country, for hacking to death a shrine caretaker. From The Independent:

Shrine caretaker, Rahamat Ali, 60, was hacked to death in November 2015 in the northern district of Rangpur. Six others accused of the attack were acquitted by the court.

The convicted men were members of the Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh group, public prosecutor Rathish Chandra Bhowmik told reporters.

Police believe the same group, which has pledged allegiance to Isis, was responsible for the most recent serious attack, when gunmen stormed a restaurant in the diplomatic quarter of Dhaka in July 2016, killing 22 people, most of them foreigners.

Does that mean the migrants within the caravan have terrorist connections? No, but it is reason enough to have heightened concerns with people from certain countries.

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