US national among extremists killed

B’desh upholds death sentence for 6 militants

DHAKA, July 28, (Agencies): A US national of Bangladesh origin was among nine suspected Islamist extremists killed in a massive gunfight in Dhaka, police said Wednesday.

Dhaka Metropolitan Police spokesman Masudur Rahman told AFP that Shahzad Rouf was one of nine young men who were killed during Tuesday’s early morning raid on a militant hideout.

“He was an American citizen. We confirmed his identity by checking finger prints,” he told AFP.

He said six other extremists were also identified by police investigators by matching their finger prints with their national identity cards.

The nine were shot dead when hundreds of armed police stormed their den at a six-storey apartment building in Dhaka’s Kalyanpur neighbourhood.

Police on Wednesday launched a hunt for a survivor of the raid. Investigators hope the escaped extremist and another man who was arrested during the gunfight will shed light on the group’s claimed ties with the Islamic State group (IS).

Rouf, 24, was a business administration student at the North South University (NSU), Rahman said.

Local media said he was a close friend of Nibras Islam, one of five gunmen who attacked an upscale Dhaka cafe on July 1 and killed 22 people, mostly foreigners.

Police believe the nine were part of the same group that carried out the cafe attack.

NSU, a top private university where well-off people send their children for higher education, has been a hotbed of Islamist extremism.

Another of its students was shot dead in a northern Bangladesh town a week after the Dhaka cafe attack when Islamists launched a major assault on the country’s largest Eid prayer congregation, where some 250,000 people gathered.

Seven of its students were also convicted and jailed in December last year for the murder of an atheist blogger in early 2013, kickstarting a deadly campaign against secular activists and religious minorities.

Raid

Dhaka police chief Asaduzzaman Mia told reporters after the raid that most of the extremists killed in the operation were highly educated and from the country’s elite.

Rouf’s father, Touhid Rouf, told AFP that he was shown a body, but was not sure whether it was that of his son.

“I am not 100 percent sure. I am confused. Maybe it is because the body had an autopsy and it was partly decomposed. We need a DNA test,” he told AFP.

He confirmed that his son was an American passport holder and that he had been missing from home for the last six months.

A US embassy spokesman refused to comment on Rouf’s case.

Rouf had been named on a list of missing people prepared by the elite security force Rapid Action Battalion after authorities raised concerns that he might have fled the country and joined the Islamic State group.

The nine had claimed that they were members of the Islamic State organisation, with officers recovering the group’s black flags and robes from their hideout.

But the national police chief rejected the claim, asserting that the nine were members of banned homegrown militant outfit Jamayetul Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB).

IS said it was responsible for the attack, releasing images of the carnage and photos of the five gunmen posing with the group’s flag.The group has claimed responsibility for dozens of murders of religious minority members and foreigners in Bangladesh in recent months.

Bangladesh authorities, however, have steadfastly maintained that the IS has no presence in the world’s thirdlargest Muslim majority nation. They blame homegrown groups such as JMB.

The government of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina has launched a nationwide man-hunt for Islamists, arresting more than a dozen suspected extremists including one of JMB’s regional heads.

One of nine suspected militants killed in a police raid in Bangladesh this week was a Bangladeshi-American who was a friend of one of the gunmen who attacked a cafe on July 1 killing 22 people, police said on Thursday.

Assaults

The attack on the Holey Artisan Bakery, a cafe in Dhaka’s diplomatic quarter, was one of the most brazen militant assaults in the country’s history.

Most of the 22 people killed were foreigners and police have been scouring the country for accomplices of the five gunmen who were all killed when police ended the siege.

On Tuesday, police raided a building in a Dhaka suburb and killed nine militants, who police said were from the same domestic group as the cafe attackers, and who had been plotting their own similar attack.

A British lawyer for an engineer detained for nearly a month after surviving a deadly siege at a Dhaka cafe has slammed authorities for refusing his client access to legal representation.

Police seized Hasnat Karim for questioning after the July 1 attack on the Western-style cafe by Islamist militants that left 20 hostages and two police officers dead.

Relatives said Karim, who holds dual Bangladesh and British nationality, was used as a human shield by the Islamists during the attack after going to the cafe with his wife to celebrate his daughter’s birthday.

His lawyer Rodney Dixon, speaking from London, said the 47-year-old was being held at a secret location in Bangladesh and was being interrogated without a lawyer present.

“He cannot be kept incommunicado in detention. He must have access to his lawyers while he is being questioned,” Dixon told AFP late on Wednesday.

“They should release him immediately since there is no evidence of his involvement in any crime. There is absolutely no evidence that he was the ring leader or involved in any way in the attack,” he said.

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A Bangladesh court Thursday upheld the death sentence for six Islamist militants convicted over a suicide bombing in 2005 of a lawyer’s office that killed eight people, a top prosecutor said.

Bangladesh’s judiciary is under pressure to fast track cases involving militants as the government faces mounting criticism to crackdown on Islamists over a series of recent deadly killings.

A bench of two high court judges rejected appeals from the six convicted over the 2005 bombing, claimed by local extremist group Jamayetul Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB).

“The court upheld the death orders against the six JMB extremists as the charges against them were proved beyond any doubt,” deputy attorney general Sheikh A.K.M. Moniruzzaman told AFP.

JMB has also been blamed for a siege this month by five gunmen on an upscale cafe in Dhaka that killed 20 mostly foreign hostages and two police officers.