DHAKA: Three gunmen who killed 20 people in the Bangladeshi capital city have been identified after their photographs have been released, and one of them is named as Rohan Ibne Imtiaz, the son of a member of the ruling party, Awami League. The other two killers are identified as Shamim Mubashir, who went to Scholastica — one of Dhaka’s top schools, which was also attended by Rohan — and Nibras Islam, who went to another elite School, Turkish Hopes, and also studied at Malaysia’s Monash University. His Facebook page shows a picture of him shaking hands with actress Shraddha Kapoor.
Rohan’s father, S M Imtiaz Khan Babul, a leader of the party’s Dhaka City chapter and deputy secretary general of the Bangladesh Olympic Association, had lodged a police complaint on January 4 as his son went missing.
The revelation came even as the Bangladesh government insisted that the killers were members of homegrown outfit Jamaeytul Mujahdeen Bangladesh (JMB), rather than IS. Hossain Toufique Imam, political adviser to PM Sheikh Hasina, blamed ISI for facilitating the attack.
“Pakistan’s ISI and Jamaat connection is well known…they want to derail the current government,” Imam told TV channel NDTV, adding that all victims were hacked to death brutally like Jamaat and local terror groups do.
As India watches closely on the evolving terror spectre across its eastern border, reports of Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh activists and members of Jamaat-e-Islami turning to the ruling Awami League to work under cover are giving the jitters to the security establishment.
If an Awami leader’s son can be a terrorist, any JMB link will only complicate the situation, said an intelligence official. Earlier, too, there have been intelligence reports of JMB and Jamaat-e-Islami members seeking Awami League’s shelter to officially revoke their punishment. An Awami tag makes getting passports and visas easy, particularly to India.
A senior Bangladesh government official said there were reports of terror elementstaking shelter in Awami League. In February 2013, after 17 Awami supporters were killed by Jamaat activists in Satkhira, many of them had joined AL, he said.
He said the youth had been so thoroughly indoctrinated that even the educated from rich families have turned into killers.
Intelligence officials felt JMB’s larger plan could be to destabilize Bangladesh. Home minister Asaduzamman Khan, however, told reporters that there is no IS link to the attack and those involved were home-grown terrorists who belonged to JMB or HuJI and were not from madrassas.
