DHAKA: Bangladesh made its first arrests over an Italian aid worker’s murder as authorities insisted Monday the killing was a plot by government opponents to trigger anarchy and not the work of Daesh.

Police paraded four people detained for the killing of 50-year-old Cesare Tavella late last month, along with a motorbike said to have been the getaway vehicle.

The killing near Dhaka’s diplomatic zone was the first of a series of attacks to be claimed by Daesh and was followed days later by the gunning down of a Japanese farmer in northern Bangladesh.

A weekend bombing of the capital’s main Shiite shrine, which killed one person and wounded dozens more, has further heightened the fears of minorities living in the mainly Muslim but officially secular nation.

But although that attack was also claimed by Daesh, the government responded by denying the extremist group was active in Bangladesh and instead rounded up dozens of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s opponents.

Speaking after the four suspects were brought in handcuffs before the media, Dhaka police said they had all admitted killing Tavella on “the orders of a so-called big brother who offered them money.”

“They carried out the murder to embarrass the government, to put the government under pressure and to create anarchy,” Dhaka police commissioner Asaduzzaman Mia told reporters.

“So far what they’ve admitted to us is that they were not specifically targeting Cesare Tavella but their aim was to kill any white-skinned foreigner.

“Their big brother wanted to prove that Bangladesh is not safe for foreigners and if they could prove that, then it would put pressure on the government.”

Police described two of the suspects as drug addicts who have previous criminal convictions, while another was a drug-dealer and the fourth was “a cold-blooded killer.”

They did not elaborate on the identity of the “big brother” said to have ordered the killing of Tavella, who worked for a faith-based Dutch charity.

But Mia pointed a finger at the opposition and insisted the murder could not have been carried out by Daesh or by another Islamist group behind the recent killings of atheist bloggers.

“There is no militant connection with this killing. This is entirely a local group which wants to make political capital,” he said.

“We all know the identity of those people who have been trying to create anarchy in the country since January,” he added in reference to protests led by the main opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), which began at the start of the year.

His comments echoed those of Home Minister Asaduzzaman Khan Kamal who told reporters after the shrine blast that “the IS organization does not exist in Bangladesh.”