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Bangladesh Says Head of Group Blamed for Cafe Siege Dead
[An Nahar] The head of a Bangladeshi Islamist group accused of staging a deadly siege at a cafe and the killing of several foreigners died while trying to evade arrest earlier this month, security officials said Friday.Abdur Rahman died in hospital on October 8 after jumping from the fifth floor of a building on the outskirts of Dhaka during a raid by the Rapid Action Battalion  (RAB), an elite security unit.The identity of Rahman, who was leader of the Jamayetul Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB), was later confirmed through his possessions and by his family, who were shown pictures of his body, the RAB said in a statement. Several documents, letters and emails that were later retrieved by the RAB "all proved that Abdur Rahman was the emir (head) of the new JMB", the statement added. Bangladeshi authorities are insistent that the JMB was behind a siege at an upmarket cafe in Dhaka on July 1 in which 20 mostly foreign hostages were killed, even though the Islamic State ...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling Allaharound with every other sentence, but to hear the pols talk they're not reallyMoslems.... group grabbed credit. The RAB said that some of the documents recovered during their raid had been signed by Rahman using the alias Sheikh Abu Ibrahim al Hanif. While the statement made no mention of IS, the April issue of Dabiq, a magazine affiliated to the organization, reported that Shaykh Abu Ibrahim Al Hanif was the jihadists' "emir" in Bangladesh. A RAB front man refused to comment on whether the two were the same men. RAB, which is tasked with tackling militancy and serious crimes, has listed 19 attacks carried out by the JMB, including the fatal shootings of an Italian aid worker and a Japanese national late last year and a series of murders of religious minorities. The siege at the cafe in July was by far the deadliest attack and caused widespread alarm about the growth of Islamist extremism in a country where more than 90 percent of the population is Moslem. Posted by: Fred 2016-10-22 |
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