Bangladesh police raid hideouts, kill 11 militants
Bangladeshi security forces have killed 11 militants blamed for the massacre of nearly two dozen people, mostly foreigners, in a July attack on a café in the capital Dhaka.
Minister of Home Affairs Asaduzzaman Khan said in a statement that the Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) had killed the militants in three raids on the hideouts of the banned Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB) group in the Dhaka suburb of Gazipur and the central district of Tangail during the early hours of Saturday.
“We requested them to surrender but they opened fire at our officers, which prompted them to retaliate,” Khan said, adding that all “extremists” were members of the JMB group.
According to Mufti Mahmud Khan, a RAB spokesman, some firearms, ammunition and meat cleavers were discovered during the raids.
Khan also said the JMB’s new leader, known as Akash, was among the dead. Akash came to be the new head of the group after security forces killed the group’s former ringleader Tamim Ahmed Chowdhury, a Canadian citizen of Bangladeshi origin, in August.
Police said the 30-year-old Chowdhury was behind the deadly attack on the café in Dhaka on July 1, where 22 people were shot and hacked to death.
In the wake of the massacre, the Daesh Takfiri terrorist group claimed responsibility for the assault but authorities in Dhaka strongly dismissed the claim, arguing that Daesh had no presence in the Muslim-majority country. However, according to security forces, the scale and sophistication of the attack suggested that trans-national criminal networks had been involved.
Khan added that seven militants were also arrested on Saturday after security forces raided hideouts in two industrial towns in the vicinity of the capital and seized sums of money from “extremists.” The detainees had committed robberies to fund their activities, he said.
The JMB was founded in 1998 and gained prominence in 2001 but was officially banned by Dhaka in February 2005, after it was revealed that the group had been behind hundreds of bombings across the country and deadly attacks against NGOs.
The group was long dormant after its top leaders were executed in March 2007, but it has recently begun to recruit young members.
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