Law enforcers will not harass youths who have been recruited to do militant activities if they want to return to their normal life, said Inspector General of Bangladesh Police AKM Shahidul Hoque yesterday. 

If the youths inspired and given financial assistance by any vested quarter to get involved in militancy admit their faults and return to their normal life, police will not harass them, he said as the chief guest at a views-exchange meeting on preventing terrorism and militancy with people of different professions at a hotel in Cox's Bazar.

“Talented youths are brainwashed with a misinterpretation of religion that killing people of different faiths will lead them to heaven,” the police chief said, citing that investigators obtained such information during interrogations of the arrested militants.

Nobody came to receive the bodies of the five militants killed during the Operation Thunderbolt at the Holey Artisan Bakery in the capital's Gulshan on July 2.

None but an imam, who was there to conduct the namaz-e-janaza, attended the funeral of a militant killed during the Sholakia attack.

“These are the examples that families and parents hate and reject militant children,” Shahidul said.

The IGP said the police had unearthed facts of 90 percent militant incidents that occurred across the country. Three-hundred cases are pending while 56 militants have been sentenced to death. Six of them have so far been executed.

Underscoring the need for building national unity to root out militancy, the police chief said, “The militants are defaming Islam in the name of so-called jihad”.

They are actually taking a position against religion and humanity, he added.