DHAKA — Indian investigators call him most wanted. Ten cases stand open against him at police stations across India. The Bangladeshi counter-terrorism officers who questioned him for sixteen days after his arrest concluded he was the second-ranking figure in al-Qaeda’s South Asian branch and the head of its propaganda wing. On 10 October 2024 he walked out of Kashimpur High Security Central Jail in Gazipur on bail, and nobody in authority appears to have located him since.
About a month ago intelligence officers went looking for Maulana Ikramul Haque at his family’s house in Bororchar, in Mymensingh Sadar. They spoke to people in the neighbourhood, including a Union Parishad member, and then to his father. They left without him.
The calendar is what lifts this above a police-blotter item. On 10 August the UN Security Council’s Analytical Support and Sanctions Monitoring Team published its thirty-eighth report, document S/2026/651, and it does two things at once. It warns that al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent is working to build cells in Bangladesh, operating through small dispersed units rather than large formations, and describes the group as evolving from a fragmented outfit into a regional entity with its own logistics and financing. It also attributes the November 2025 car bombing at the Red Fort in Delhi, which killed eleven people, to the same organisation, an attack a member state had earlier blamed on Jaish-e-Mohammed. Ikramul Haque is the man investigators on both sides of the border describe as AQIS’s recruiter in northern India.
None of that has been tested. He was arrested, held, granted bail and released, and the anti-terrorism case filed against him at Sabujbagh police station in Dhaka has produced no conviction. Almost everything on the record about what he is alleged to have done comes from police officers speaking to Bangladeshi reporters without their names attached, and Eastern Herald could not independently confirm the account of his disappearance.
His father, Muhammad Zainal Abedin, says his son has been teaching at a madrasa in the Sanarpar area of Narayanganj, on Dhaka’s south-eastern edge, since his release. Asked which madrasa, he could not say. Mymensingh’s police superintendent, Mohammad Kamrul Hasan, said he had heard the same thing and that officers were looking into it. Ikramul is 33 and the eldest of three.
A vague answer is a particular problem in this file. Police say he has used at least five names: Abu Talha, Maulana Sabet, Nur Hossain, Mansur and Milan. Abu Talha was the working name in India. Maulana Sabet was the one attached to AQIS in Bangladesh. A man who has operated under five identities and cannot be placed at a named address is not the same problem as a man who has simply moved house.
He has also, according to the Counter Terrorism and Transnational Crime unit, obtained state documents under a false identity before. CTTC says he held an Indian passport in the name Nur Hossain, listing his father as Sabu Mia, his mother as Nabia Bibi, and an address in Dinhata, in the Cooch Behar district of West Bengal. Dinhata sits close to the Bangladesh border. His wife, Faria Afrin, is alleged to have held an Indian Aadhaar card as Mariam Khatun.
The biography police have assembled runs through madrasas. Born in Mymensingh, he grew up around Dhanmondi and Faridabad in Dhaka. In 2007 he placed first nationally in the Hifz examination of Befaqul Madarisil Arabia, the Qawmi madrasa education board, and in 2017 he completed his Dawra-e-Hadith at Jamia Arabia Imdadul Uloom Faridabad. The following year he travelled to India and enrolled at Darul Uloom Deoband in Saharanpur, Uttar Pradesh. An officer on the case says that is where the AQIS connection was made. He reads and speaks Bengali, Urdu, Arabic and English, and a CTTC official says it was his facility with computers that won him the dawah portfolio unusually quickly, running online classes for members.
On one point the record disagrees with itself. Police say he re-entered Bangladesh illegally in September 2022 and ran organisational work from Mymensingh until his arrest. The Jamestown Foundation’s Militant Leadership Monitor, in a March 2024 profile drawing on the same case material, put the illegal return at 2020 and said he married in Bangladesh after it. Two years is not a rounding error in a case whose central allegation is unlawful movement across a border.
The direction of the evidence is less contested. Indian police arrested eight suspected AQIS members in Bhopal in October 2022 and a further group in Gujarat in May 2023, and men in both groups named him as the person who recruited them. Bangladeshi officers picked him up in the Madartek area of Dhaka on 30 May 2023 along with his wife. He spent sixteen days in interrogation before being sent to Kashimpur, where a prison official says he was detainee 339/23. His wife was released about a month after her arrest.
Why bail was granted, on what conditions, and whether he was required to report to anyone have not been made public. The release fell in the months after 5 August 2024, when the Hasina government collapsed and the courts and prisons of Bangladesh moved an extraordinary volume of cases in a short period. Whether that context bore on his file is not something anyone has said on the record. The same courts are now weighing sedition charges against Muhammad Yunus, the man who led the interim government that followed.
The connection between al-Qaeda and armed groups in Bangladesh is four decades old, and it runs through the same seminary. Maulana Sheikh Abdus Salam, who founded Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami Bangladesh, was studying at Darul Uloom Deoband in 1984 when he left for Pakistan and then Afghanistan, where he commanded a unit fighting the Soviet intervention and, with others from Bangladesh, came into contact with Osama bin Laden. Two generations later the same seminary appears in the file of a man Bangladesh cannot find.
That earlier chapter ended on a gallows. Shaykh Abdur Rahman, who led Jamaatul Mujahideen Bangladesh rather than HuJI-B, was captured in Sylhet on 2 March 2006 and convicted over the suicide bombing at Jhalakathi on 14 November 2005 that killed two senior assistant judges, Jagannath Pandey and Sohel Ahmed. He was hanged with five other men in the early hours of 30 March 2007. In interrogation he described meeting a Bangladeshi fighter called Tariq, also known as Sohel, in Madartek in Dhaka in 1998, and discussing al-Qaeda’s work with him. AQIS later said Tariq had been killed fighting in Kandahar. Madartek is where Ikramul Haque was arrested twenty-five years afterwards, which is a coincidence of geography in a crowded city rather than evidence of anything, but it is a small neighbourhood.
AQIS itself occupies an odd legal position. The US State Department designated it a foreign terrorist organisation and a specially designated global terrorist on 30 June 2016, citing the killings of the writer Avijit Roy, an American citizen, the US embassy employee Xulhaz Mannan, and the bloggers Oyasiqur Rahman Babu and Ahmed Rajib Haider, as VOA reported at the time. The United Nations has never added the group to its own 1267 sanctions list, and the Monitoring Team’s report notes as much in parentheses. Bangladeshi authorities identify Ansar al-Islam as the AQIS branch inside the country.
What nobody has published is a bail condition, a fresh warrant, or a request from Delhi for his return. Neither government has said in public that it is looking for him through the other, at a moment when Dhaka’s relationship with Delhi is fracturing over other things entirely. The madrasa where his father says he teaches has not been named, which means the one account that would explain his whereabouts is also the one account nobody can check.
In Bororchar the officers who came looking a month ago went away again.
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