Bangladesh’s Home Minister added a clarification to early reporting that the attack in Bangladesh. Turns out, the minister believes it wasn’t ISIS but a another group inside Bangladesh. Does it really matter?
According to Yahoo! News:
The jihadists who slaughtered 20 hostages at a Dhaka restaurant were members of a homegrown Bangladeshi militant outfit and not followers of the Islamic State group, a senior minister said Sunday.
“They are members of the Jamaeytul Mujahdeen Bangladesh,” Home Minister Asaduzzaman Khan told AFP, referring to a group which has been banned in Bangladesh for more than a decade.
“They have no connections with the Islamic State.”
Islamic State has claimed responsibility for the killing of the hostages and two police officers during an 11-hour siege that ended on Saturday but the government has consistently denied that international jihadist groups are operating in Bangladesh.
Police have released the names and photos of six of the attackers who were shot at the end of the siege. A seventh was arrested and is being interrogated by Bangladeshi intelligence officers.
Khan said that all of the attackers were well-educated and most came from wealthy families.
“They are all highly educated young men and went to university. No one is from a madrassa,” the minister said.
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Asked why they would have become Islamist militants, Khan said: “It has become a fashion.”
So it’s become fashion in Bangladesh to join a radical Islamic jihadi group, go guns up and target innocent Westerners. What was also in fashion for these terrorists was separating out those that could recite the Koran from those that couldn’t, mainly Westerners, including an American college student on a summer internship. Sadly, the response from the Bangladeshi government was demonstrably stronger than the one from the White House.
From the Washington Post:
A military spokesman, Brig. Gen. Nayeem Ashfaque Chowdhury, told reporters that “most of the victims were killed brutally with sharp weapons.” In video footage shot from a nearby building, a young man can be seen patrolling the restaurant’s interior, carrying what appears to be a foot-long blade. According to local media, those who couldn’t recite the Koran had their throats cut. The Islamic State shared on Twitter photos purporting to show victims lying in pools of blood.
U.S. officials are in contact with authorities in Bangladesh, according to a White House statement.
“Our deepest condolences go out to the families and loved ones of those killed, and we hope for a speedy recovery for those wounded,” the statement said. “This is a despicable act of terrorism,
“It was an extremely heinous act,” Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina said in a televised statement, according to the BBC. “What kind of Muslims are these people? They don’t have any religion. My government is determined to root out terrorism and militancy from Bangladesh.”
Image: Source
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