Gono Odhikar Parishad Member Secretary Nurul Haque Nur yesterday refuted reports of meeting Israeli citizen Mendi N Safadi.

He told this to The Daily Star a day after Prothom Alo reported that Safadi in a text message sent on June 26 had confirmed meeting Nur.

Nur said Safadi had met several ruling Awami League leaders, and photos of those meetings were doing the rounds on social media.

"This means he is serving the interest of the ruling party. Since we are doing anti-government politics, the government can make Safadi come up with such a claim. Had any such meeting taken place, they [the ruling AL] would have evidence like video footage. They would have presented that," he said.

When The Daily Star approached Safadi through a phone number mentioned on the Facebook page of Safadi Center for International Diplomacy, Safadi said, "I am not interested in giving any press interview for now."

A rift within the Gono Odhikar Parishad has made headlines recently after its convenor Reza Kibria alleged that Nur had secretly met Safadi abroad.

Nur maintains that no such meeting ever took place.

Many have asked who Safadi is, the level of his influence, and what he has to do with Bangladesh.

WHO IS SAFADI?

Safadi's name first came to the fore in Bangladesh in May 2016 when Aslam Chowdhury, a BNP leader, reportedly met him at an event in India. Aslam was jailed for an "anti-state plot" centring the meeting.

A man named Shipan Kumar Basu had arranged the meeting.

Shipan is the founding president of World Hindu Struggle of which Safadi was an adviser.

In a Facebook post of Safadi Center for International Diplomacy on April 7 this year, Safadi wrote: "In recent years, Shipan has used my name to take money from businessmen and politicians, things that I did not know about and was not involved in, made many promises that I did not know about... .

"I hope that I will be able to do an activity [sic] with the right people in order to obtain the rights of the Bangladeshi people, and be able to bring about the change."

Safadi Center for International Diplomacy, Research and Public Relations, where Safadi is the director, prepared a report about the Holey Artisan attack in Dhaka. The title of the article is: The siege of Holey Artisan café and its impact on the country's future counter terrorism effort.

Israeli newspaper Israel Hayom says Safadi is also a lecturer on Islamic affairs, terrorism, and the Middle East.

Previously, he was chief of staff in the Office of the Deputy Minister for Development of the Negev and Galilee and Regional Cooperation, and served as a liaison between Israeli and Syrian officials and the Syrian opposition.

In an article titled "Why Likud voters should support minority candidates" published on January 23, 2019, it was written that Safadi, who is an inhabitant of Israel occupied Golan Heights, is not a Jew but a Druze. The Druze religion complies with the aspects of Hindu and Greek philosophy incorporated into the tenets of Islam.

Safadi is a member of Israel's ruling party Likud and a supporter of Benjamin Netanyahu.

He was the chief of staff of Ayoob Kara. Kara became a member of the Knesset (Israeli parliament) in 1999. Kara worked as deputy speaker and chairman of foreign workers' committee. In 2009, after briefly leaving the Knesset, he was elected back into office under the platform of unifying the Druze and Jewish people.

From 2009 to 2013, Kara served as Israel's Deputy Minister for the Development of the Negev and the Galilee and from 2015-17 as deputy minister for regional cooperation. In May 2017, he was appointed as the communications minister.

The same article said Safadi has extensive political experience and he founded the Safadi Center for International Diplomacy, Research, Public Relations and Human Rights, where he works to enhance Israel's public image in the greater Islamic world.

Safadi's activism is not limited to Syria and Kurdistan, he has been fighting to promote democracy, human rights and minority rights in Bangladesh. Due to his international public diplomacy work, he travels frequently to India, Azerbaijan, Europe and the US, it added.

On July 12, 2015, quoting Al-Akhbar, a newspaper serving as Hezbollah's mouthpiece in Lebanon, The Times of Israel reported that a computer hack revealed the identity of Syrians in contact with Israel, mentioning correspondence of Safadi with members of the Syrian opposition around the world.

The article alleged that Safadi, working on behalf of the Israeli government, tried to recruit Israeli agents in Syria and Lebanon, smuggle weapons into the hands of Islamist rebel groups in Syria, and locate targets within Syria to be bombed by coalition forces.