Banladesh arrests nearly 600 mutiny suspects

Nearly 600 border guards of the paramilitary Bangladesh Rifles, allegedly involved in the bloody mutiny in February, have been arrested from across the country, officials said on Monday.

Officials of Criminal Investigation Department (CID) of police said the suspected mutineers were arrested in the past 24 hours from different BDR sectors and battalion headquarters to be tried for "sedition".

The soldiers were produced before courts at different district headquarters and were subsequently sent to jail to face the trial, a CID spokesman said.

The arrests were part of the campaign to track down the rebellious BDR soldiers outside Dhaka since last week as authorities earlier said works were underway to identify the carnage at their Pilkhana headquarters in the capital.

Nearly 700 hundred suspected rebels were detained in the past one week from their barracks outside Dhaka as officials said the arrests brought the number of suspects to more than
1,800, of them some 800 immediately after the rebellion that had left 57 Army officers serving the paramilitary troops dead.

Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina had earlier this month said "the country had stood at the edge of a civil war as the rebellion spread at 33 BOPs (BDR's border outposts) across the country."