An Islamist extremist accused of being one of the masterminds of last year’s deadly siege at a Bangladeshi cafe was shot dead during a pre-dawn raid on Friday in Dhaka, police said.
The bodies of Nurul Islam Marzan and another suspected extremist were found after officers raided a property in the capital’s Rayer Bazar neighbourhood, a spokesman for the Dhaka Metropolitan Police told AFP. “We found two bodies. One of them was Marzan and another was a suspected extremist,” additional deputy commissioner Yusuf Ali told AFP.
Ali said that Marzan, who was aged around 30, was “one of the masterminds” of the siege at the upmarket Holey Artisan Bakery on July 1 last year in which 18 foreign hostages were shot or hacked to death.
Mohibul Islam Khan, the deputy chief of Dhaka police’s counter terrorism and transnational crime unit, told AFP that Marzan was shot dead during the raid by the anti-terrorism police.
Khan said Marzan was an Arabic student at Chittagong University before he dropped out and joined an offshoot of Jamayetul Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB), a home-grown extremist group which has been blamed for the cafe attack.