Bangladesh police kill 3 militants in raid on hideout
Bangladeshi police forces have raided a militant hideout outside the capital Dhaka, gunning down three militants, including the suspected architect of a terror attack on a café last month.
“We can see three dead bodies here,” said senior police officer Sanwar Hossain on Saturday as quoted in an AFP report, adding that those killed “most probably” included Bangladeshi-Canadian citizen Tamim Chowdhury, who has been identified as the mastermind of the July 1 assault on a Dhaka café that killed 22 people, most of them foreigners.
"Tamim Chowdhury is dead. He is the Gulshan attack mastermind and the leader of JMB (Jamayetul Mujahideen Bangladesh)," Hossain added.
According to the official, police forces had earlier staged an hour-long gun battle with extremist militants at Paikpara in Narayanganj, a city 25 kilometers south of the capital city.
The report further cited Bangladesh national police chief AKM Shahidul Hoque as saying that police were "99 percent sure" that Chowdhury was in the hideout when it was raided by police.
Chowdhury, the report noted, had returned from Canada in 2013 and was leading the banned JMB, which police blames for last month’s terror attack in which the victims were shot and hacked to death in the country's worst terrorist incident.
“We’ve recovered 20 bodies. Most them had been brutally hacked to death with sharp weapons,” said Brigadier General Nayeem Ashfaq Chowdhury following the terror attack without identifying the nationality of the victims.
Thirteen survivors were also rescued at the end of the siege in an upmarket neighborhood of the capital, including three foreigners.
The development came two weeks after Bangladeshi security officials announced the arrest of five local members of JMB that allegedly intended to stage bombing attacks in Dhaka.
"All of them were from the northern part of the country and were sent to Dhaka," said chief of Dhaka’s counter-terrorism police unit Monirul Islam at the time.
He added that the suspects had plans to launch attacks on high-profile targets in the city but did not elaborate.
He further stated that police officers recovered 25 detonators and a huge amount of raw materials for explosives at the site of their arrest in Kalyanpur, the same suburb where police killed nine suspected JMB members on July 26.
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