A Dhaka court yesterday accepted charges against six members of banned militant outfit Ansar-Al-Islam in a case filed over writer-blogger Avijit Roy murder on February 26, 2015.

Law enforcers are to write to the home ministry to take necessary steps to ban militant outfit Ansar-Al-Islam, an alleged Bangladesh chapter of al-Qaeda in the Indian Sub-Continent.

Siegfried O. Wolf, a professor of political science at the South Asia Institute of the University of Heidelberg, said that foreign intelligence agencies did withhold sensitive information from Bangladesh, fearing that it could be misused. The country is in the grip of extreme political polarization, he said, and there is factionalism and rivalry among security agencies.

Ansar-Al-Islam, Bangladesh chapter of al-Qaeda in the Indian Sub-Continent, claims responsibility for the killing of blogger Niladri Chattopadhyay terming him an enemy of Allah.