DHAKA: A senior Bangladeshi minister accused a main opposition party official Wednesday of ordering an Italian aid worker’s murder as part of a plot to destabilize the government.

Police are hunting for Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) official M.A. Quayum for allegedly orchestrating the deadly shooting of Cesare Tavella in the capital late last month.

Four people have been arrested over the attack, with police on Monday saying three of them admitted carrying out the September 28 killing on the orders of a so-called “big brother.”

“Quayum is the big brother,” Home Minister Asaduzzaman Khan Kamal told reporters on Wednesday.

Quayum, who is believed to have fled the country, is a mid-ranking BNP official and a former Dhaka councillor.

Kamal said police have “conclusive evidence” Quayum ordered the killing as part of a “conspiracy” to trigger anarchy and pile pressure on the government, although he did not elaborate.

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.

Although that attack was also claimed by Daesh, the government responded by denying that the extremist group was active in Bangladesh.