Bangladesh arrests four Islamists blamed for café attack
TOKYO (AFP) – Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe will propose plans to create hundreds of thousands of jobs in the US when he meets President Donald Trump at an upcoming summit in Washington, Kyodo news reported Tuesday.
Tokyo is busy putting together an investment package which "would translate into hundreds of thousands" of new US jobs, Kyodo said, citing unnamed Japanese government sources.
Abe will pitch Japanese companies' cooperation in projects like high-speed rail construction and shale oil development, the report added.
The package is to be put forward when the two leaders meet on February 10.
Japan is one of Washington's closest allies but Trump alarmed Tokyo policymakers during his election campaign late last year by musing about pulling thousands of US troops from the region and suggesting that officially pacifist Japan may need nuclear weapons.
Kyodo said that Abe will take up the issue of auto trade at the summit and stress economic contributions of Japanese automakers' investments and jobs in the US.
DHAKA (Reuters) — Bangladesh security forces on Wednesday arrested four members of an Islamist militant group blamed for an attack on a cafe in Dhaka in 2016 which killed 22 people, most of them foreigners.
The July attack in Dhaka's diplomatic quarter was claimed by the Islamic State and was the worst militant attack in Bangladesh, which has been hit by a spate of killings of liberals and members of religious minorities in the past few years.
The four arrested, aged 21 and 28, were members of a faction of the Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB) militant group, known as New JMB, which has pledged allegiance to Islamic State and which police believe was involved in organising the cafe attack.
“One of them, was the IT head of the group,” Mufti Mahmud Khan, spokesman of the police-led Rapid Action Battalion, which is involved in counterterrorism efforts.
They were arrested in a raid on a house on the outskirts of the capital Dhaka, he said, adding that firearms and a huge quality of explosives were found.
Police have killed around 50 suspected Islamists in raids since the cafe attack, including the man police said was the attack mastermind, Bangladesh-born Canadian citizen Tamim Ahmed Chowdhury.