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From teacher to terrorist

SHAKHAWAT LITON and CHAITANYA CHANDRA HALDER
He began his career as a madrasa teacher with the intention of disseminating Islamic knowledge among his students. But teaching was not something he actually wanted to take up as a profession for the rest of his life. Mufti Abdul Hannan finally emerged as a notorious militant leader in the country.
His organisation, Harkat-ul-Jihad-al Islami (Huji), jolted the country through a series of gruesome terror attacks on cultural and political programmes, including the August 21 grenade attack on an Awami League rally to assassinate Sheikh Hasina.
Mufti Hannan joined the war against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s. His return to the country turned out to be a curse for his own motherland.
He went to Pakistan to study higher Islamic education at a madrasa in Karachi in the 1980s. But the then ongoing war in Afghanistan drew him into it. During the month of Ramadan, he moved to Afghanistan where he received training.
The Mujahideen gave him a rifle to fight against the former Soviet Union troops. Along with around a thousand volunteers, Hannan fought for them for 15 days. He got injured in a battle and received treatment at a hospital in Peshawar, Pakistan for ten days.
Along with others, Hannan returned home sometime between the fag end of the 1980s or early 1990s. He brought with him the rifle he had got from the Afghan Mujahideen.
He then started working as a teacher at a madrasa in his village in Gopalganj. Later, he established a cadet madrasa in Kotalipara of Gopalganj.
Sometime in 1994, he was invited to join a meeting with some leaders of Huji, the Islamic militant outfit which was launched in 1992 by some Afghan returnees. He was inspired by the aims and ideals of Huji and joined the group.
Initially, Hannan was made publicity secretary of the outfit at thana level. Later, he started visiting Huji's office in Khilgaon. He gradually emerged as an important leader of the organisation.
He set up links with international militant groups. He became the operation commander of the Bangladesh chapter of the international Islamist militant organisation Huji.
Hannan was present in some crucial meetings where plans to carry out terror attacks on cultural programmes of Udichhi in Jessore and of Chayanautat Ramna Batamul, among others, were hatched.
He was also present at the meeting where it was decided to attack the Awami League, the "enemy oflslam", a term the militants labelled the government with, as the then AL led government defended the High Court verdict against Fatwa in 2000 and resisted rowdy protests waged by some Islamic parties against the court order.
According to the plan, a 76-kg bomb was planted in Kotalipara to assassinate the AL chief, who was scheduled to hold a rally there, in July 2000. The bomb was made at his soap factory in Gopalganj under his supervision. Police, however, recovered the bomb. Hannan is the prime accused in the plot.
He and his men also carried out terror attacks on British High Commissioner Anwar Chowdhury, AL leader Suranjit Sengupta and former Sylhet city mayor Badruddin Ahmed Kamran.
Yet Hannan was above the law for years as he enjoyed the blessings of the then BNP government. Even the home minister of the BNP government assured him of "no fear" in staying in the capital.
But the countrywide serial bomb blasts in August 2005 by another militant outfit Jama'atul Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB) made his fate uncertain. In the face of huge criticism, BNP-led government was forced to launch crackdown on militants.
The Rapid Action Battalion (Rab) started raiding places in the city, after it came to know about Hannan's probable whereabouts during an interrogation of his detained brother Munshi Anisuzzaman. Once Rab got confirmation of Hannan and his family's presence on the first floor of a two-storey building in Madhya Badda, they conducted a search drive around 5:30am on October 1, 2005. They woke up the owner and residents of the building and started checking their identities.
During the identification process, Hannan tried to flee, seeing the collapsible gate of the house open.
After running around 100 yards from the house, Hannan jumped into a pond. Two Rab men also jumped in and caught him. Initially, he claimed that he was not "Mufti Hannan".
Rab took him back to the house where his wife, two sons and two daughters identified him as Mufti Hannan.
One of the Rab officials, who took part in the raid, said it was difficult to identify Hannan as he had trimmed his once-long beard and changed his hairstyle. His skin was also tanned.
The militant leader was in police remand for around 150 days in a row, the highest period for which an accused has been confined in such interrogation. He was shown arrested in connection with many other cases following his confession.
Before yesterday's conviction in Ramna Batamul blast case, Hannan was handed down a life term in an arms case in Gopalganj in 2003. He was awarded the death sentence in December 2008 in a killing case linked to the grenade attack on the British High Commissioner.
[The report was prepared on the basis of Hannan's deposition in the Ramna Batamul blast case, and newspapers' reports]