According to a report in a bi-lingual Bangladeshi newspaper, a 20-year-old terrorist, Ershad Hossain, alais Mamun, belonging to the Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen (JMB), has confessed to the police in Chittagong that plans were afoot to turn their country and portions of neighbouring India and Myanmar into a full-fledged Islamic state with Sharia laws in force by 2020.

Ershad reportedly told the police that most of the terrorist cadres involved in implementing the plan were trained in Pakistan. The JMB itself has 1,000 camouflaged members under its wings, ready to wage war, the report mentioned. JMB is the banned terror outfit allegedly linked to last October's Burdwan blast.

The newspaper reported that Ershad had told the media after his arrest that there were 15 JMB commanders in Chittagong district who were in charge of 150 eshar (key members), 500 gayri eshar (mid-level members) and several ansar (associate members). Associates can contact only their immediate seniors, but were not to use their mobile phones.

To conceal their identities in various tactical locations, militants were disguising themselves as street hawkers, day labourers or setting up small stationery shops in dense neighbourhoods.

The report says that the plan is that Bandarban, Rangamati, Cox's Bazar, Khagrachhari, Chittagong and some areas on either sides of the Indo-Bangladesh and Indo-Myanmar international borders would be chosen for the operation before bringing all of Bangladesh under their rule. Ershad, arrested from a garden house in Chittagong early this week with grenade making materials, gunpowder and militant literature, is a district commander of the banned JMB. Earlier, he was associated with the students' wing of Jamaat-e-Islami Bangladesh, the Islamic militant organisation which wants India dismembered for militarily aiding the liberation struggle of Bangladesh from Pakistan in 1971.

Members of the three banned terror outfits, JMB, HUJI (B), Ansarullah Bangla Team (ABT) and Hizb-ut-Tahrir, were also briefed by a four-member Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) delegation to function under the aegis of an apex militant organisation, the "International Lions Force of Hindustan", when they visited Chittagong last October, Ershad had confessed during interrogation, said the report. JMB chief Saidur Rahman had also held meetings with ABT's Mufti Jashim Uddin Rahmani and HUJI leaders inside Dhaka's Kashimpur prison for a joint effort in realisation of a common goal of an Islamic state in the region.

A Pakistani diplomat, Mohamad Mazhar Khan, working in the visa section at the Dhaka high commission, was expelled from Bangladesh last January for allegedly using local contacts to push fake Indian currency across the border and for exchanging incriminating documents for fomenting terror with an ABT leader in an upmarket Dhaka neighbourhood.