Word: ransoms
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...such a widespread manner. Nearly every rung of society is being terrorized. Truck drivers are assaulted on the roads; leading businessmen have been kidnapped for ransom; journalists have been tortured and murdered; and one of the nation's pre-eminent intellectuals, Humayun Azad, was almost killed in February by a gang of knife-wielding assailants. But the wake-up call for many Bangladeshis came last week, when the bodies of two cloth merchants were found beheaded and mutilated in a forest outside Dhaka. Stunned by the discovery, many traders in the city closed their shops or held rallies to highlight...
...armed guards to ensure the extortionists don't target his part of the market. Outside Dhaka, the level of lawlessness has been equally bad, especially in Chittagong, where many businessmen have been targeted for kidnappings by extortionists. "We live with the constant threat of either being kidnapped for ransom or killed," says a businessman in Chittagong, who declines to be identified out of fear...
...religious tolerance. Bangladesh's Hindus, who constitute about 10% of the population of the predominantly Muslim nation, say they are increasingly being intimidated by gangs of Islamic fundamentalists, who attack them in their homes, warn them to pack up and leave for India and, for good measure, extort ransom from them. "The condition of religious minorities has become terrible under the present government," says Subrata Chowdhury, a Dhaka-based Hindu human-rights lawyer. The brutal attack on well-known intellectual Azad, a moderate Muslim who is an outspoken critic of Islamic fundamentalism, has also led many in Bangladesh's intelligentsia...
...boarding them warily. Last week their government confirmed that its security forces have for the past three months played a cat-and-mouse game with a group that calls itself AZF. The hitherto unknown group has threatened to bomb France's railroads unless the government forks over a hefty ransom...
Last week French officials tried to pay AZF the equivalent of $5.2 million it had demanded for revealing the location of other bombs. But after an attempt to deliver the ransom to a field 65 miles south of Paris failed, French officials dispatched 10,000 workers to inspect the nation's 20,000 miles of tracks. They found nothing. "We're still taking this extremely seriously because we know these people are very organized and intelligent," says a French security official. He says AZF's missives suggest it is an "extreme leftist, perhaps anarchist" group but stops short of calling...