Bangladesh police kill 3 militants in raid on hideout

Bangladeshi police forces have raided a militant hideout outside the capital Dhaka, gunning down three militants, including the suspected architect of a terror attack on a café last month.

“We can see three dead bodies here,” said senior police officer Sanwar Hossain on Saturday as quoted in an AFP report, adding that those killed “most probably” included Bangladeshi-Canadian citizen Tamim Chowdhury, who has been identified as the mastermind of the July 1 assault on a Dhaka café that killed 22 people, most of them foreigners.

"Tamim Chowdhury is dead. He is the Gulshan attack mastermind and the leader of JMB (Jamayetul Mujahideen Bangladesh)," Hossain added.

According to the official, police forces had earlier staged an hour-long gun battle with extremist militants at Paikpara in Narayanganj, a city 25 kilometers south of the capital city.

The report further cited Bangladesh national police chief AKM Shahidul Hoque as saying that police were "99 percent sure" that Chowdhury was in the hideout when it was raided by police.

Chowdhury, the report noted, had returned from Canada in 2013 and was leading the banned JMB, which police blames for last month’s terror attack in which the victims were shot and hacked to death in the country's worst terrorist incident.

“We’ve recovered 20 bodies. Most them had been brutally hacked to death with sharp weapons,” said Brigadier General Nayeem Ashfaq Chowdhury following the terror attack without identifying the nationality of the victims.

Thirteen survivors were also rescued at the end of the siege in an upmarket neighborhood of the capital, including three foreigners.

SS