Police identify eighth militant killed in Kalyanpur raid

Police say they have identified a JMB trainer among the nine suspected militants killed during Tuesday’s raid at an apartment in Dhaka’s Kalyanpur.

Militants said they were IS, witness recounts conversation between suspected militants and police

Raihan Kabir alias Tarek, the eighth of the killed suspected militants to be identified, was the Dhaka region coordinator of the Jamaa’tul Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB), said Counterterrorism Unit chief Monirul Islam.

Kabir trained the men, who attacked a cafe in Gulshan on the night of Jul 1 and killed 20 people, Islam told a media briefing on Thursday.

Police claim that Kabir was also involved in the November 2015 attack at a check-post, which left a constable killed.

Police came under attack from an apartment in a six-storey building during a routine search operation in the wee hours of Tuesday.

A few hours later, a SWAT team stormed the apartment, triggering a gunfight resulting in the death of nine suspected militants.

Police released the photos of the dead men (Parental guidance is advised to see the photo of bloodied bodies) the same day and sought information on the persons pictured.

Identities of seven of them were confirmed by matching their fingerprints with the National ID database, police said on Wednesday.

They were named as Md Abdullah from Dinajpur, 23, Abu Hakim Nayeem, 24, from Patuakhali, Motiur Rahman from Satkhira, Zobayer Hossain, 22, from Noakhali, and Taj-ul-Haque Rashik, 24, from Dhanmondi, Akifuzzaman Khan, 24, from Gulshan, and Shehzad Rauf Arka from Basundhara, in Dhaka.

Of them, Shehzad is a US citizen. The youth, 'missing' since February, was a friend of one of the dead Gulshan cafe attackers, Nibras Islam.

Dhaka Metropolitan Police Additional Commissioner Islam told the media that Akifuzzaman Khan from Dhaka’s Gulshan is the grandson of Monaem Khan, the governor of erstwhile East Pakistan, which emerged as the sovereign state of Bangladesh after the 1971 war.

He as well as Rashik and Araka were North South University students, while Abdullah, Raihan, and Nayeem studied in madrasas.

“Raihan Kabir used the alias Tarek. He was involved in the attack on police in Ashuliya. He was listed with the police as Tarek and we were looking for him,” said senior officer Islam.

He said Raihan trained the Gulshan cafe killers.

“We knew him as Tarek. The Gulshan attackers were among the seven trained at a remote sandbar in Gaibandha. This Raihan, alias Tarek, was one of the two trainers.”

Additional Police Commissioner Islam claimed that Raihan had been operating as the JMB’s Dhaka region coordinator after the death of some top JMB organisers in gunfights with police in early 2016.

Source: bdnews24