The seizure of an entire drone unit, comprising all crucial components, from of a 48-year-old Rohingya man at Hoikyang in Teknaf of Cox’s Bazar district on January 17 afternoon has thrown Bangladesh security forces along the border with Myanmar into a tizzy, Northeast News has reliably learnt.
While Bangladeshi security agencies are tightlipped about the seizure, Teknaf police station officers have confirmed to Northeast News that Border Guard Bangladesh (BGB) personnel arrested Mohammad Mostafa Kamal, a resident of Tula Tuli in Maungdaw district of Rakhine State in Myanmar, on January 17.
Acting on specific inputs, troops of the BGB’s 64th Battalion deployed in Teknaf “conducted an operation within their area of responsibility” at a location “approximately 2 kms north of border pillar 18 and about 800 metres inside Bangladeshi territory”.
The BGB raided the residence of a former village union member Mostafa Kamal at Choudhary Bari close to the Bangladesh-Myanmar border and seized several components of a drone allegedly belonging to the armed Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA).
The seized items include a drone camera, three drone batteries, a drone controller, two walkie-talkie sets and six solar controllers.
When assembled, these components together can function as a full-fledged drone capable of aerial surveillance. However, there is no information on the make – whether they are of Chinese or Turkish origins – of these drone components.
Teknaf police station Officer-in-Charge Saiful Islam confirmed Mostafa Kamal’s arrest but were reluctant to divulge details about the operation as well as the drone since “investigations were on”.
Senior BGB officers of the 64th Battalion did not take repeated phone calls by Northeast News.
However, it is learnt that Bangladeshi security agencies have now cast their net wide to probe whether other drone units are being operated by the ARSA or any other Rohingya armed organisations operating on the Bangladesh-Myanmar border.
The general location of Hoikyang is part of a sensitive zone in which the ARSA and Rohingya Solidarity Organisation (RSO) have been armed with Turkish-made sophisticated assault weapons which have been extensively used in their attacks against the Arakan Army in Maungdaw in August 2025-January 2026.
How these weapons reached Bangladesh and the means adopted to move the arms caches to the Rohingya organisations is known to very few Bangladeshi security officials and Army officers.
But it is suspected that these consignments were offloaded from cargo ships that docked at Chittagong on different dates over a period of four to five months in 2025.
The Mohammad Yunus-led interim regime in general and National Security Adviser (NSA) Khalilur Rahman played clandestine roles in arming the ARSA and RSO even as NGOs functioning in the Cox’s Bazar area acted as conduit for Turkish money that eventually went into funding the Rohingya organisations.
The use of military equipment – weapons, high frequency communication sets, bullet-proof helmets and other sophisticated accessories – used by the armed Rohingya outfits have been highlighted by the Arakan Army in several press notes issued in September-November 2025.
The weapons training to ARSA and RSO fighters is said to have been provided by specific officers of Bangladesh Army’s 10th Infantry Division and the Directorate General of Forces Intelligence (DGFI) in ways that built in deniability.
