They have not even tried to arrest or conduct investigations against any accomplices and advisors of Kawsar, who once claimed his patron to be the Dubai-based Mafia don Daud Ibrahim.

His local patrons, he says, include several lawyers, doctors and businessmen of Rajshahi and Chapainawabganj areas.

Top Rajshahi Metropolitan Police officials pointed to jurisdictional limitations and the costs of investigation to explain the delay in their activities.

"We have done nothing but process the papers of the arrested Hiqma men as JIC was interrogating them. Besides, we have to work in a limited area almost spending money from our own pockets," said a police official.

Although the JIC could not ascertain any major information from Kawsar, sources said they exposed new names and clues that have raised suspicions of the possibility of an international link with the group.

After Kawsar's arrest in November, police searched for Hussain Bin Abdul Latif who, police said, spent many years in the United States and Japan and was also with the Hiqma group when it stormed the Boalia police station in the city. "He fled with a large bag," police said at the time.

Kawsar launched the so-called 'multi-national project' Al Hiqma Samaj Unnayan Shangstha in 2001 and kept their work limited within the western part of the city.

Militant activities of the group began in January 2002, when they pasted posters at the Rajshahi University campus calling upon people to join their group to free the country from corruption and injustices 'through a good use of arms'.

Kawsar told investigators that one Shafiqul took him to Dhaka in a night coach, where they met one Ayen Uddin near Shahbag, who advised him to build up the NGO.

The twenty-year-old Kawsar is said to have started Al Hiqma with a revolutionary zeal in order to create anarchy throughout the country, said a police report.

He named Azhar Ali and Rashidul Alam as the group's vice-presidents, Abdul Hannan as general secretary, Rahamat Ali as cashier, Nizam Akhtar and Shameem Uddin as assistant general secretaries and Rabiul Islam as his administrative officer.

Kawsar and some of his goons were arrested on various occasions on charges of creating panic, cheating and in arms case as of 2003. So far, they have managed release on bail in every case due to lack of police activities.