Four Bangladeshi workers accused of planning to join the Daesh group were jailed for between two and five years in Singapore on Tuesday for raising money to fund attacks in their homeland.
Muslim-majority Bangladesh has seen a spate of brutal attacks on secular bloggers and religious minorities recently, with gunmen killing 20 hostages — mainly foreigners — at an upmarket restaurant in the capital Dhaka earlier this month in an attack claimed by Daesh.
District Judge Kessler Soh said in handing down the sentences that terrorism presents a “threat not just to our community but the international community at large.”
Court documents said the men contributed, collected or possessed funds for the alleged plot ranging from Sg$60 ($44) to Sg$1,360 to help fund a terror campaign in their country.
The four, who pleaded guilty and could have been jailed for up to 10 years, were the first to be convicted under a Singaporean law against terrorist financing.
“Terrorism financing and any act of supporting terrorism must be roundly condemned and deterred,” the judge said.
Prosecutors said that while working in Singapore, mostly in construction, the four formed an organization “with a view to joining Daesh.”
They planned to overthrow the Bangladeshi government “by means of an armed struggle in order to establish part of the caliphate in Bangladesh,” prosecutors added.
Alleged ringleader Rahman Mizanur, 31, was jailed for five years. He had tried several times to join Daesh in Syria but could not get visas to Turkey or Algeria, court documents showed.

Source: Arab News