Bangladesh militant armed with explosives shot dead

dhaka — Bangladesh police shot and killed a suspected militant who tried to cross a security checkpoint on a motorcycle armed with explosives early on Saturday, the latest in a string of security threats since a deadly attack on a cafe in July.

Bangladesh’s counter-terrorism Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) said some of its officers opened fire when a man riding a motorcycle tried to break through a checkpoint in Dhaka’s Khilgaon area.

“Several bombs were found attached to his body,” the RAB’s Legal and Media wing chief Mufti Mahmud Khan said, adding that an apparent suicide attack could have been foiled.

He said two officers were wounded in the incident but it was not clear how they got hurt.

The latest incident came a day after a suicide bomber blew himself up at a security forces base near the international airport in the South Asian nation’s capital, Dhaka. The Daesh group claimed on Saturday the suicide bomb attack a day earlier on security forces. “A caliphate soldier in Bangladesh carried out a martyrdom operation with an explosive belt in a camp for special forces in Dhaka,” the group announced in its daily Al Bayan radio bulletin.

Bangladesh has stepped up security at all airports and prisons across the country after Friday’s attack. The most serious recent attack came last July, when gunmen stormed a Dhaka cafe and killed 22 people, most of them foreigners.

On Thursday, four suspected members of an militant group blamed for that attack were killed during a police raid in the southeastern town of Chittagong. — Reuters, AFP