Bangladeshi commandos ‘killed hostage by mistake’

DHAKA: Bangladeshi security forces may have accidentally shot dead an innocent kitchen worker when they stormed a Dhaka cafe where gunmen were holding people hostage, police have said.

Saiful Islam Chowkidar, a pizza maker at the Holey Artisan restaurant, was among six men who were killed by the security forces on Saturday when commandos stormed the eatery to end a 12-hour siege, a senior police official said on Tuesday.
“We killed six people in the restaurant. A case has been registered against five. The sixth man was a restaurant employee,” Saiful Islam, a top police official investigating the attack, told Reuters news agency.
Separately, a Bangladeshi politician spoke Tuesday of his horror to learn his son was among the suspects, and said many young men from wealthy, educated families were going missing.
Imtiaz Khan Babul said his 22-year-old son Rohan Imtiaz, who was killed by commandos, had been a top-scoring student whose behavior gave no hint he was radicalized before he disappeared last December.
“I was stunned and speechless to learn that my son had done such a heinous thing,” a tearful Babul told AFP.
“I don’t know what changed him. There was nothing that would suggest that he was getting radicalized.”
Babul, an official with the ruling Awami League party, said he believed his son may have been “brainwashed” online.
He had not seen Rohan since traveling to India in December with his maths teacher wife, leaving their three children in Dhaka.
In the months following Rohan’s disappearance, Babul lobbied senior party officials to help find his only son and even scoured the city’s morgues. As he searched, he met other families who had suffered the same fate.
“I met so many parents whose boys had gone missing,” he said. “Even yesterday, one of them was saying that I was lucky that I got the body of my boy. Some of them are not so lucky.”
Security forces shot dead six men when they stormed the cafe, bringing the all-night siege to an end, while one suspected attacker was taken alive and is being questioned.
Witnesses say the perpetrators of the attack, claimed by the Daesh terror group, spared the lives of Muslims. The 20 people killed included nine Italians, seven Japanese, a US citizen and a 19-year-old Indian student.
On Tuesday the bodies of the Japanese victims arrived on a government plane in Tokyo. All had worked with the government-run Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) in Bangladesh.
Authorities said an aircraft carrying the bodies of the nine Italian victims had flown out of Dhaka early Tuesday.
Bangladesh’s foreign minister met diplomats Tuesday following the attack, the worst by far targeting the international community in Dhaka.
Hundreds of foreign firms operate out of Bangladesh and its clothes manufacturing industry is the lifeblood of the economy, accounting for more than 80 percent of exports.
“We’ve raised our worries during the meeting. We discussed how to deal with the situation and ensure security for the diplomatic community and the foreign community here,” one foreign diplomat told AFP, speaking on condition of anonymity.
The government says homegrown extremists are responsible for the deaths of some 80 secular activists, foreigners and religious minorities murdered over the last three years.
It has repeatedly denied international terrorist networks have a presence in the country, even though Daesh and a South Asian branch of Al-Qaeda have claimed a number of attacks.
Bangladesh’s home minister has said the men behind Friday’s attack at an upmarket cafe were highly educated and from wealthy families.
Among them was Meer Saameh Mubasheer, an 18-year-old student at an elite school whose father told AFP he was “a victim of his simplicity.”
“He couldn’t keep his attention on one thing for too long. But he was always into religious study,” said Meer Hayet Kabir.
“He was slow in his mental growth and didn’t have many friends.”