DHAKA – Bangladesh police said on Friday they had arrested five members of a domestic Islamist militant group planning suicide attacks in the capital, Dhaka, as authorities hunted for the mastermind of a deadly assault last month.

Police swooped on the cell on Thursday on the outskirts of Dhaka and said the suspects, including four would-be bombers and a bomb-maker, were sent to the capital to bolster the attack capability of the group Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB).

“All of them were from the northern part of the country and were sent to Dhaka,” said Monirul Islam, chief of the Dhaka police counter-terrorism unit.

He said the men were planning to launch attacks against high-profile targets in the city but he did not provide details.

Officers recovered jihadi material, 25 detonators and a huge amount of raw materials for explosives at the site in Kalyanpur, the same suburb where police killed nine suspected JMB members on July 26, Islam said.

Gunmen take hostages in Dhaka cafe

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Reuters, AFP

Police have accused JMB, which has pledged allegiance to Islamic State, of a series of attacks over the past 18 months that has ratcheted up worries about the threat of militancy in the Muslim-majority South Asian country.

The attacks include the July 1 assault on an upmarket Dhaka cafe in which 22 people were killed, most of them foreigners.

Islamic State claimed responsibility for the cafe attack and while the government has dismissed the claim, security experts say the scale and sophistication of the assault suggest links to trans-national networks.

Islam, the counter-terrorism chief, said police believed that Tamim Ahmed Chowdhury, a Canadian citizen and prime suspect in the cafe attack, is in Dhaka.

Police are hunting for him, a sacked army major-turned militant, Syed Mohammad Ziaul Haque, and a third suspects known as just “Merjer” in connection with the cafe attack, he said.

Analysts say Chowdhury was the same person Islamic State identified in April as its commander in Bangladesh. But the government insists that Islamic State has no presence in the country.

BANDAR SERI BEGAWAN – Local villagers at Kg Birau, Tutong brought in a ‘big catch’ yesterday as a 15-foot long crocodile was found in one of the traps they set-up for the animal at Sg Birau in Kg Lamunin.

One of the catchers, Md Isa Hj Layeh told The Brunei Times in a phone interview that crocodiles have long been spotted in the village, especially at the river area near Jln Kecil Birau-Sentol, where the villagers’ buffalo farm is located.

“Some of our (villagers) buffaloes recently went missing so we set up the traps a few days ago to catch the culprit (crocodiles),” he said, adding that in the past few years, villagers have caught more than five of these reptiles, which have been known to cause destruction to farm and livestock in the village.

15-foot crocodile caught in Brunei village

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Facebook screengrabs, The Brunei Times/ANN

Md Isa went on to say that the crocodile – believed to be 15 feet long and 2-feet wide – fell for the trap around 7am yesterday where he and other villagers proceeded to secure the animal and bring their catch on land.

Aside from setting up traps for the wild animals for safety measures, Md Isa said that they also advised other villagers and visitors to refrain from coming too close to the river and its vicinity.

“Many use this river for fishing activities, so we always warned them to be extra cautious and stay away from areas where these crocodiles are normally spotted,” he added.

Man tries to catch large alligator on his own

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Internet screengrabs

Strange creatures spotted in Singapore and around the world

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Sina Weibo, Internet screengrabs, Stomp, Reuters

MANILA – The Philippines military said on Friday it was taking seriously what it believed was a call by Islamic State (IS) militants for an attack on the Miss Universe contest being held in the country next year.

The military said a recent bomb-making video posted on social media, apparently by Islamic State militants in the Middle East, carried a message in Arabic script reading: “create bomb for Miss Universe”.

The pageant is due to be held in the capital, Manila, in January. “We are taking the threat seriously,” armed forces spokesman Colonel Edgard Arevalo told reporters, though adding that authorities had yet to establish the authenticity of the video or determine its source.

The Philippines says there are no IS militants in the country although the group has accepted, in a video message, the allegiance of a notorious Philippine militant group known as Abu Sayyaf.

“We reiterate that there is no ISIS in the Philippines,” Arevalo said, referring to IS. “What we have are groups claiming affiliations with ISIS in their bid to draw funds. It is not farfetched for ISIS to claim to have cells in the Philippines to show global membership.”

Miss Universe 2016 gets heroine’s welcome in Philippines

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AFP

The Ministry of Tourism, which helps organise the Miss Universe pageant, was not alarmed by the threat, said ministry spokeswoman Ina Zara-Loyola.

“We consider this as serious as well as the traffic problem that affects our daily life,” she said, adding that the authenticity of the video was impossible to verify.

The government was confident the army and police were “more than capable in ensuring the public safety and security”, she said.

The Miss Universe beauty pageant, formerly owned by US presidential candidate Donald Trump, has been held in Manila twice before, in 1974 and 1994.

The reigning Miss Universe is Filipina-German model Pia Wurtzbach, the third winner from the Philippines.

On Wednesday, President Rodrigo Duterte ordered the army to destroy the Abu Sayyaf group saying if not, the country risked being “contaminated” by Islamic State.