Canadian militant killed in shootout with police
DHAKA, Bangladesh — A Canadian who became the head of an Islamic State-affiliated group in Bangladesh and was the mastermind of a deadly terrorist attack on a café last month was one of three suspected militants killed in a shootout here Saturday.
Tamim Ahmed Chowdhury, 30, who spent many years in Windsor, Ont., died during an exchange of gunfire in a residential neighbourhood near the capital of Dhaka, according to Monirul Islam, chief of the Bangladeshi counterterrorism unit.
The suspects were killed by a special operations team, he said. The police found grenades, pistols and AK-22 assault rifles at their apartment.
Chowdhury, 30, was a naturalized Canadian citizen who graduated from the University of Windsor with a chemistry degree in 2011. A person with the same name had earlier attended J.L Forster Secondary School, also in Windsor.
“People who knew him say he was a quiet guy,” Prof. Amarnath Amarasingam, a post-doctoral fellow at Dalhousie University’s Resilience Research Centre, told Postmedia News in June. “Not much else is known about him at the moment.”
Published reports have said his father emigrated to Canada from Bangladesh in the 1970s.
Amarasingam, who has been researching foreign fighters, said in June he had heard Chowdhury had returned home to Bangladesh after complaining about being “harassed” by Canadian police and had subsequently emerged as a leader of Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh, a new branch of the domestic terrorism outfit that produced the café attackers and is affiliated with the Islamic State.
According to the Beirut Daily Star, Chowdhury had been using the alias Shaykh Abu Ibrahim Al-Hanif and had been identified in the Islamic State propaganda magazine Dabiq as the “emir” of its branch in Bangladesh.
In an issue distributed in April, Al-Hanif referred to Hinduism as a “filthy, co-worshipping religion” and threatened to “slaughter” those who did not subscribe to his militant version of Islam.
“We let our actions do the talking,” he is quoted as saying. “And our soldiers are presently sharpening their knives to slaughter the atheists, the mockers of the prophet and every other apostate in the region.”
Bangladeshi officials have said Chowdhury helped the café attackers with safe houses and weaponry and accompanied them as they made their way to the upscale café-bakery on the evening of July 1. Ultimately, militants killed at least 22 people, including several foreigners and two police officers, in the overnight siege.
“This is a significant progress for our counterterrorism drive because Tamim was responsible for collecting finances and later distributing them, recruiting and radicalizing members of elite families,” Islam said.