Police seek whereabouts of 260 missing in hunt for militants

DHAKA: Bangladesh police are trying to determine the whereabouts of at least 260 young men who have been missing for a year or more, a security officer said on Wednesday, as part of an effort to track militants after a deadly attack this month.

Five young men killed 22 people, most of them foreigners, in an attack on an upmarket Dhaka cafe on July 1 claimed by IS. Three of the attackers were from affluent Dhaka homes who had broken off contact with their families months ago.

Authorities have blamed the attack on a domestic militant group, but security experts say the scale and sophistication of the assault suggested links to a trans-national network.

In the days after the attack, the government appealed to families to contact authorities if their sons had disappeared.

A senior officer with the police-led Rapid Action Battalion (RAB), which is involved in the counter-terrorism effort, said a list of 260 missing young men had been compiled from reports from families and intelligence tipoffs. YANGON: In a rare admission, Myanmar’s still-powerful military said on Wednesday that soldiers had killed five villagers during an interrogation last month in northern Shan State, and promised to prosecute the perpetrators.

A senior officer told a news conference in Yangon that a court martial was under way and that the verdict would be made public. The military also pledged help for the victims’ families.

“The court martial found that they violated the rules, failing to follow certain procedures, that led to the death of the victims during the interrogation,” said Deputy Major General and chief of military intelligence Mya Tun Oo. Myanmar’s armed forces have often been accused by human rights groups and Western governments of abuses during decades of conflict with ethnic armed groups.