WEB DESK
A son of a member of the ruling Awami League of Bangladesh was among the militant killers who slaughtered 20 foreigners at a restaurant in Dhaka on Friday.
Rohan Ibne Imtiaz, the son of a member of the ruling Awami League and two other militants have been identified after their photographs were released. The other two killers appear to be 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 has 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 stating that his son was missing.
Earlier 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, “All victims were hacked to death like Jamaat and local terror groups do”.
Most of the suspected Holey Artisan attackers, whose photos surfaced through different sources, were from well-off families and had English medium backgrounds.
They used to frequent the popular upscale eatery in Gulshan, said their friends and investigators.
One suspect, however, was a madrasa student in Bogra.
They remained missing for several months. Family members and friends through social media posts pleaded for their return.
One of them is Rohan Imtiaz, son of Imtiaz Khan Babul, a former youth and sports secretary of Dhaka City Awami League.
Imtiaz filed a general diary with Mohammadpur Police Station on January 1 this year after Rohan went missing on December 30, 2015, a police source said.
Rohan’s mother is a teacher at Scholastica, one of the leading English medium schools in the capital.
US-based Site Intelligence, which monitors jihadi activities, around 10:00pm on Saturday posted photos of five youths, saying the images were released by global terror body Islamic State (IS).
In the post, the five were mentioned as “Dhaka attackers”. All in black Panjabi and scarf, they were posing with guns.
Around an hour later, police headquarters released pictures of five dead bodies, saying they were the café attackers. Four of the dead appears to be the ones seen in the SITE photos.
The releases prompted social media users to crosscheck the pictures and look into educational and family backgrounds of the youths.