A video-message said to be from Al-Qaeda's current chief Dr Ayman Al-Zawahiri is circulating on the internet, calling on Muslims in Bangladesh to resist the evil plans of the 'leading criminals in the subcontinent and the West against Islam,' reports bdnews24.com.
The news agency has a copy of the video-message.
The entire message with video footage laid on Al-Zawahiri's audio lasts nearly 29 minutes and is titled "Bangladesh: Massacre Behind a Wall of Silence".
The first two minutes screen footage of last year's May 5 police action at a Hifazat-e Islam rally in Dhaka. Then starts Al-Zawahiri's message hitting at the Western media's alleged silence on 'how Muslims are massacred in Bangladesh'.
"My Muslim brothers in Bangladesh, I invite you to confront this crusader onslaught against Islam, which is being orchestrated by the leading criminals in the subcontinent and the West against Islam, the prophet of Islam and the Islamic creed, so that they may turn you into slaves of a despotic and disbelieving system."
Describing Bangladesh as a 'huge prison', the message says the honour and dignity of Muslims is at stake in the country.
"Bangladesh is the victim of a conspiracy in which the agents of India, the corrupt leadership of Pakistan Army and treacherous power-hungry politicians of Bangladesh and Pakistan are all involved," the message says.
Al-Zawahiri, who is said to have clandestinely visited Bangladesh many times earlier in the decade, called on Bangladeshis "to gather around the true scholars of Islam, support them and protect them."
"I invite you to back them and support them and guard them. And I invite you to launch a massive public uprising in defence of Islam against the enemies of Islam," the Al Qaeda chief says.
"I invite the leading scholars (Ulamaye keram) of Bangladesh to fulfill the role that Islam has given them."
He says Bangladesh has not worked as a nation which was created more than 40 years ago 'to protect the independence, glory, honour and freedom of its people.'
The Al-Qaeda chief's tirade appears to have been provoked by the war crimes trials, in which most senior leaders of the country's leading Islamist party, Jamaat-e-Islami, are implicated.
One of them, Abdul Quader Molla, has already been hanged. Several others face death and life sentences.
In addition, many Jamaat leaders and activists are in jail on charges of involvement with violence last year.
The Jamaat and other Islamist groups in Bangladesh and elsewhere have also called for 'uprisings' against the present government and attacked it for upholding secularism.
Zawahiri was at his attacking best on the question of democracy.
"If this system (democracy), man-made constitution brings in a government that can please the western world, the West encourages and supports it .. if it brings a government that even slightly opposes the West or the enemies of Islam, then the tanks, artillery, bombs and bullets of the slaves of the West lie in wait for such government, " he said in the video message.
"And Egypt is only a fresh example of this, besides Algeria in the 90s.
