Bangladesh arrests another suspect behind cafe siege
Jahangir Alam led around two dozen attacks on religious minorities outside Dhaka, police say
Bangladeshi police yesterday said they had arrested an extremist accused of being one of the “masterminds” of last year’s deadly siege at a Dhaka cafe where 22 hostages were killed.
A police spokesman said Jahangir Alam was detained on Friday night by counter-terrorism forces in Elenga, a town some 120km north of the capital.
“He is one of the main masterminds of the Holey Artisan Bakery [cafe] attack,” Yousuf Ali, an additional deputy commissioner of the Dhaka police force, said.
“He was a member of a new faction of Jamayetul Mujahideen Bangladesh [JMB] and was directly involved in the murder of at least 22 religious minorities including Hindu priests and a Christian and foreigners [at the cafe],” he said.
Japanese and Italian diners were among the 18 foreigners shot and hacked to death in the attack on July 1 last year. The siege lasted for 10 hours until army commandos, using armoured vehicles, stormed the compound.
Sanwar Hossain, an additional deputy commissioner of the police’s counter-terrorism and transnational crime unit, said Alam was a close associate of Tamim Chowdhury, the slain Bangladeshi Canadian, who was named as the primary architect of the cafe siege.
“[Alam] was notorious. He led around two dozen attacks on religious minorities outside the capital,” he told AFP.
Alam, 32, was present with Chowdhury at a Dhaka hideout where they planned and organised the cafe attack, Hossain added.
The arrest comes a week after police killed two extremists including another plotter of the cafe siege in a shoot-out in Dhaka. Chowdhury was killed during a raid outside the capital in August last year.