Bangladeshi police yesterday stormed a militant hideout outside of Dhaka, shooting dead three Muslim extremists, including the suspected mastermind of an attack on a cafe that killed 22 mostly foreign hostages last month.
“We can see three dead bodies here,” senior police officer Sanwar Hossain told reporters.
“Tamim Chowdhury is dead. He is the Gulshan attack mastermind and the leader of JMB [Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh, a domestic militant outfit],” he said.
Chowdhury, a Bangladeshi-Canadian citizen, had earlier been named by police as the suspected mastermind of the attack on the cafe in Gulshan, an upscale Dhaka neighborhood.
The bodies were retrieved after police staged an hour-long gun battle with extremists in Narayanganj, a city 25km south of Dhaka, Hossain said.
“The operation went on for an hour. We can see three dead bodies. They did not surrender. They threw four, five grenades at police and fired from AK-22 rifles,” Bangladesh Police Inspector General A.K.M. Shahidul Hoque told reporters. “Three extremists were killed. Among them, one of the dead persons looked exactly like the photo of Tamim Chowdhury that we have.”
Bangladesh’s government has blamed the JMB for the July 1 cafe attack in which 20 hostages, including 18 foreigners, were killed along with two policemen.
Police say Chowdhury, 30, who returned from Canada in 2013, has been leading a faction of the militant group, also said to be behind scores of murders of members of religious minorities.
“We heard that Tamim Chowdhury is among the dead. [His] physical appearance shows that it was Tamim Chowdhury, but we need to be 100 percent sure,” Bangladeshi Minister of Home Affairs Asaduzzaman Khan told reporters.
Police on Aug. 2 announced a 2 million taka (US$25,519) reward for information leading to the arrest of Chowdhury, who disappeared after allegedly masterminding the cafe attack.
Together with their elite security force, the Rapid Action Battalion, the police have carried out a series of raids on suspected militant hideouts.
In June, more than 11,000 people were arrested in a bid to quash a spate of brutal murders of secular writers, gay rights activists and religious minorities.
The Islamic State group claimed responsibility for the Gulshan attack, releasing photographs from inside the cafe during the siege and of the five men who carried out the deadly assault and were shot dead at its finale.
Bangladeshi authorities have rejected the claim, saying international extremist networks have no presence in the world’s third-largest Muslim majority nation.
Bangladesh has been reeling from a deadly wave of attacks over the past three years, including on foreigners, rights activists and members of the country’s religious minorities.
Both the Islamic State and a branch of al-Qaeda have claimed responsibility for many of the attacks.
Critics say Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s administration is in denial about the nature of the threat posed by Muslim extremists and accuse her of trying to exploit the attacks to demonize her domestic opponents.
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