Bangladesh on Sunday blamed “homegrown” Islamist terrorists and Pakistan’s spy agency ISI for the country’s worst terror attack in which 20 hostages were hacked to death, ruling out the role of the Islamic State (ISIS), as the shocked nation began observing two days of national mourning.
“let me clear it again, there is no ISIS or al-Qaeda presence or existence in Bangladesh...The hostage-takers were all home-grown terrorists not members of ISIS or any other international Islamist outfits,” Home Minister Asaduzzaman Khan told PTI.
“We know them (hostage-takers) along with their ancestors, they all grew here in Bangladesh...They belong to homegrown outfits like JMB (Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh),” he said.
The ISIS has claimed responsibility for the killing of the hostages, mostly foreigners, and two police officers during the 12-hour siege that ended on Saturday morning after the Army stormed the Holey Artisan Bakery popular with expats in the diplomatic zone in Dhaka, killing six attackers and capturing one alive.
Hossain Toufique Imam, the political adviser to Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, said that the way in which the hostages were killed with machetes suggests the role of a local terrorist group, the banned Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen. “Pakistan’s ISI and Jamaat connection is well known... they want to derail the current Government,” Imam told a TV channel.
The arrested terrorist chickened out at the last minute, he said. Two teams of CID investigators and a bomb disposal squad on Sunday visited the Spanish restaurant to collect evidence after Bangladesh’s worst terror attack. A police source was quoted as saying by the Dhaka Tribune that all the attackers were Bangladeshi nationals aged between 20 and 28. Police said the attackers were well-educated and most came from rich families. “All of them were students and communicated at the crime scene in both Bengali and English,” the police source said.
Police chief AKM Shahidul Hoque said five of the dead gunmen were listed as militants and police had been looking for them. Police identified them as Akash, Bikash, Don, Bandhon, and Ripon.
Police have released the photos of the six gunmen killed during the raid by commandos. A seventh was arrested and is being interrogated by Bangladeshi intelligence officers. Bangladeshi media reports said that after US-based SITE Intelligence Group published photos of five gunmen holding assault rifles who, the ISIS claims, killed the hostages, former classmates have started identifying by posting their old pictures on social media.
Three of the gunmen have been identified by their former friends after their photographs were released with one of them named by an Awami league leader as Rohan Ibne Imtiaz, the son of another leader of the ruling party’s city unit, even as the attack which left mostly foreigners dead was owned by the Islamic State terror group. Rohan has been recognised as the son of SM Imtiaz Khan Babul, a leader of the party's Dhaka City chapter and Bangladesh Olympic Association's deputy secretary general. Babul had lodged a police complaint on January 4 this year stating that his son was missing.
Former classmates have uploaded a photo combo in the social media of Rohan with his parents and a photo -- reportedly released by the Islamic State -- that monitoring group SITE Intelligence published on Twitter as one of the Dhaka cafe attackers.
The Bangladesh Prime Minister vowed to trace the “roots” of the culprits who supplied weapons and explosives to the terrorists.
Her remarks came during a meeting with Japan’s State Minister of Foreign Affairs Seiji Kihara at her official residence Ganabhaban. Most of those killed were found with their throats slit. Among those rescued were Indian, Sri lankan and Japanese nationals, media reports said. Around 30 people were injured.
Meanwhile, Bangladesh Nationalist Party Chairperson Khaleda Zia on Sunday called the Gulshan cafe attack a “cowardly act” and urged for a national unity to rid Bangladesh from militancy. “All our achievement will go in vain if we cannot ensure security and eliminate militancy. let us come forward, unite, forgetting all our differences,” she said.
The Government has consistently ruled out the presence of the dreaded terror group in the Muslim-majority nation though experts have been maintaining that series of brutal attacks on minorities and secular activists had the hallmarks of ISIS group.
Warning “crusader countries” that their citizens would not be safe “as long as their aircraft are killing Muslims”, the ISIS also posted pictures of four fighters, who it said were involved in the attack, smiling in front of a black flag of the outfit.
According to the reports, three of the five attackers have so far been identified by their friends. The gunmen did a background check on religion of the captives by asking them to recite Quranic verses and tortured those who could not do so.
Hasina has asked all, including the general public, to get united to resist a “handful of terrorists”. She will also pay her respects to the victims of the terror attack at Gulshan cafe in a ceremony on Monday. The ceremony will be held at the army stadium here.