Dhaka: Bangladesh has banned the Islamist outfit Ansarullah Bangla Team (ABT), suspected of involvement in murders of several secular bloggers in recent months.

The group is also believed to be linked to Al Qaida.

“We had taken the decision to ban the outfit earlier this week on the basis of a police report ... we are implementing this decision today,” State Minister for Home Asaduzzaman Khan Kamal told journalists on Monday night after the Home ministry issued a statement announcing the ban.

The notification read “Ansarullah Bangla Team has been banned under the Anti-Terrorist Act, 2013”.

The outfit earlier claimed responsibilities of murdering at least three of the bloggers killed in recent months.

Bangladesh police on Tuesday said they had suggested the outfit be banned for suspected involvement in the murders of secular bloggers while earlier reports said the group was closely linked to Al Qaida in the Indian Subcontinent (AQIS).

Ten prominent Bangladeshis including Prime Minister Shaikh Hasina’s adviser H.T. Imam, vice-chancellor of premier Dhaka University Professor Arefin Siddique and popular writer and physicist Professor Zafar Iqbal earlier this week received death threats in letters, with police suspecting the ABT to have sent the letters in the name of “Alkaida”.

International security think tank Terrorism Research & Analysis Consortium (TRAC) described ABT as an “Al Qaida-inspired Islamic extremist group in Bangladesh that started its activities during 2007 as the Jama’atul Muslemin”.

It said the group was funded by different NGOs while it “ceased to operate when funding ended” but the outfit resurfaced during 2013 as the ABT.

According to TRAC the outfit is influenced by renowned extremist ideologues, such as Anwar Al Awlaki, while its objectives include the “radicalisation of youths in Bangladesh, inciting active participation in a local jihad and seeking control of areas in Bangladesh”.

ABT is the sixth such Bangladesh-based outfit to be outlawed for militant and anti-state activities in the country with the others being Hizb ut-Tahrir, Jama’atul Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB), Harkatul Jihad Bangladesh (Huji), Jagrata Muslim Janata of Bangladesh and Shahadat-e Al-Hikma.

The outfit first grabbed media headlines in August 2013 when police said the then little-known ABT planned to kill a dozen high profile people, after they seized a list of names during an investigation against the group.

The ban comes after three bloggers were killed in the past three months and police say four detained ABT activists confessed as they were quizzed in connection of the February 2013 murder of the first of the slain bloggers Rajib Haider, while investigators found its links to the killing of Bangladeshi-American blogger Avijit Roy in February this year.

In internet posts the group claimed responsibility for the murder of three bloggers — Avijit Roy, Oyashiqur Rahman Babu, and Ananta Bijoy Das and assassination of a faculty of northwestern Rajshahi University, sociology professor A.K.M. Shafiul Islam earlier this year.

On May 12 this year. Bangladesh witnessed the latest attack on bloggers when suspected Islamists hacked to death Ananta Bijoy Das in northeastern Sylhet.

Hours after the murder, a group called “Ansar Al Islam” claimed in a twitter message that AQIS was responsible for Das’s murder and warned that more such “atheists” awaited an identical fate.

Bangladesh earlier welcomed Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) assistance after the US national Roy was murdered in Dhaka in February while police subsequently handed over the evidence related to the assassination to the US agency after obtaining permission from a Dhaka court.