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OPINION

Clueless in Dhaka?

A Rehman
TELEVISION news on Monday as well as The Daily Star of Tuesday reported that so far detectives have found no "clues" about the grenade attack on the Awami League meeting. I found this strange. Weren't the unexploded grenades themselves clues? I also found it strange that the army team detonated the unexploded grenades at the site of the attack. I am not an expert on this matter, but couldn't some way have been found of disabling the unexploded grenades and handing them over to the police as evidence or clues? The other grenades found in Dhaka Central Jail and the Railway Hawkers' Market premises have presumably not been detonated. Hopefully, these are available for investigation into the attack.
Newspapers and TV both reported that (and viewers saw on TV) the grenades were marked "ARGES" along with numbers (presumably arms codes). I found it strange that neither print nor TVjournalists offered us further information about them. One TV reporter said that the grenades were of Chinese origin and are used in the armed forces of a number of countries in the subcontinent.
However, a simple internet search reveals that ARGES is the acronym of Armaturen
Gesellschaft m. b. H., an Austrian company. ARGES, in fact, manufactures a number of different types of grenades. The company's website shows pictures of their grenades that are exactly the same as the pictures of the unexploded grenades in Bangabandhu Avenue and in Dhaka Central Jail. The company's website has, among other things, the following description of itself and its products:
"ARGES can look back on a very long tradition in manufacturing hand grenades and components and is the leading company for producing cost-effective hand grenades with pre-formed fragments. ARGES fragmentation hand grenades show excellent fragment distribution and fragment density by using pre-formed fragments. The ARGES hand grenades product range includes:
SplHG 86 small fragmentation hand grenade for fighting in urban areas.
SplHG 85 medium fragmentation hand grenade.
SplHG 90 big fragmentation hand grenade."
The fragment distribution and fragment density on August 21 at Bangabandhu Avenue lived up to its manufacturer's promises, judging from the number of casualties. More than two hundred injured and nineteen killedin other
words, more than two entire companies (onefourth of a battalion) of innocent civilians put out of commission.
An internet search also shows that ARGES grenades were the kind that were used by the militants who staged the attack on the Indian parliament last year. At that time, though the Indian authorities properly identified the grenades, they could not trace the transmission from the manufacturers to the terrorists. However, they did say that this type of grenade is verifiably in the hands of many of the Kashmiri militant groups. ARGES grenades have also been used in terrorist attacks in Pakistan. In fact, one type of ARGES grenade is manufactured, under licence, by the Pakistan Ordnance Factory at Wah and is used by the Pakistan Army.
Since the Kashmiri militants areor werearmed by Pakistan it is very likely that they would use these grenades. That being the case, could the grenades that caused such havoc in Bangabandhu Avenue have Kashmir as their origin? And if this is so, could not our investigators look for militant factions here in Bangladesh that have links to Kashmiri separatists? Is this not a clue, or at least a basis for the beginnings of an investigation?