Suspected militant killed by Bangladesh police is a U.S. citizen

NEW DELHI — A 24year-old Bangladeshi-American student was among nine suspected militants killed in a gun battle with police in Bangladesh, Dhaka police said Wednesday.

In a Facebook post, police identified seven of the nine suspects killed in the early hours of Tuesday after a raid in a residential neighborhood in Dhaka, the capital. Those identified included six Bangladeshis and American Shazad Rouf, 24, a master’s student in business administration at North South University in Dhaka.

Rouf was born in Bangladesh but spent time in Illinois and California as a youth, his father confirmed in a brief interview.

Police said the suspects — a 10th one escaped — are part of the local Jamaat-ulMujahideen Bangladesh. A JMB factionis working with the Islamic State group, according to Monirul Islam, chief of the country’s counterterrorism unit.

Authorities said Rouf and the other suspects had apparently been living together in an apartment crammed with knives and small arms and draped in black IS flags.

After Rouf had gone missing Feb. 3, his father had sought the help of police to locate him. His name was eventually listed among the 200 or so names of missing Bangladeshi citizens released this month by the country’s Rapid Action Battalion force.

After a deadly attack on a cafe on July 1 that left about two dozen people dead, including two police officers, authorities launched a wide-ranging effort to locate Bangladesh citizens who had gone missing and whose families feared that they could be entangled in militancy. All of the six attackers in the cafe hostagetaking had gone missing in the preceding weeks and months.

Rouf’s father said his son had not shown any signs that he had been radicalized in the weeks before he disappeared.