Bangladesh has arrested three Supreme Court lawyers for allegedly passing thousands of dollars to a new Islamic militant group in the port city of Chittagong, police said Wednesday.

The three lawyers including a British-trained female barrister were picked up in the capital Dhaka on Tuesday night by Bangladesh's Rapid Action Battalion (RAB), which is tasked with tackling militancy in the Muslim-majority nation.

Bangladesh's elite security force Tuesday arrested three suspected Islamist militants, including a British citizen whom police said was the "main planner" of the murder of two prominent atheist bloggers.

Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) spokesmen said they arrested Touhidur Rahman, 58, and two other "active members" of an Islamic group called Ansarullah Bangla Team (ABT), which was banned in May over a series of killings of bloggers.

Bangladesh is to hold a census of hundreds of thousands of undocumented Rohingya who have crossed into the country seeking refuge from persecution in neighboring Myanmar.

Foreign Secretary Shahidul Haque said the government had earmarked $2.7 million for the census to be carried out in Bangladesh's southeast, near the border with Myanmar's Rakhine state.

Myanmar has returned 159 Bangladeshi migrants rescued from boats stranded off its coast in May, officials said Tuesday, the latest group to be repatriated after a migration crisis that unfurled across Southeast Asia.

More than 800 men, women and children were picked up from ships abandoned by smugglers in the Bay of Bengal in recent months, after a Thai crackdown on people-smuggling led gang bosses to abandon their human cargo on land and at sea.    

Dhaka vowed Saturday to hunt down the killers of secular blogger Niloy Chakrabarti who became the fourth such writer to be murdered in Bangladesh by suspected Islamist militants this year.

Home Minister Asaduzzaman Khan said the nation's intelligence agencies went straight to work after a gang of machete-armed attackers hacked the blogger to death at his home in the capital on Friday.

A gang armed with machetes hacked a secular blogger to death at his home in Dhaka Friday, sparking protests in the capital over the fourth such murder in Bangladesh this year.

Niloy Chakrabarti, who used the pen-name Niloy Neel, was killed after the gang forced their way into his apartment, according to the Bangladesh Blogger and Activist Network, which was alerted to the attack by a witness.

Bangladesh's high court Wednesday ordered opposition chief Khaleda Zia to stand trial in a graft case dating back to 2007, heaping further pressure on the beleaguered former premier.

The court rejected a petition by Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) leader Zia to quash the case, which was filed by a military-backed government, and ordered her to surrender to a trial court within two months.

Jubilant crowds celebrated Saturday as Bangladesh and India swapped tiny islands of land, ending one of the world's most intractable border disputes that has kept thousands in limbo for nearly seven decades.

As the clock struck one minute past midnight (1801 GMT Friday), thousands of people who have been living without schools, clinics or power for a generation erupted in cheers of celebration for their new citizenship. 

Bangladesh's highest court on Wednesday upheld the death sentence handed down to a top opposition politician for war crimes during the country's 1971 independence conflict against Pakistan. 

The Supreme Court, led by Chief Justice S.K. Sinha, dismissed Salahuddin Quader Chowdhury's appeal against a death sentence handed down by a controversial war crimes tribunal two years ago, an Agence France Presse correspondent at the court said.

Thailand on Friday said it would indict 72 people including a senior army officer over human trafficking after the plight of desperate Myanmar and Bangladesh migrants stranded at sea triggered an international outcry over the grim trade.

The move comes after vast people-smuggling networks unraveled in May when thousands of migrants were abandoned in open waters and jungle camps by traffickers following a Thai crackdown, a crisis that eventually forced a Southeast Asia-wide response.