Bangladesh says attack investigation yielding results
NEW DELHI — In the three months since a band of youths tortured and killed 20 hostages in a Dhaka restaurant, Bangladeshi intelligence officials say they’re rooting out radicals and restoring security to the streets. Their evidence? Police raids that have killed about 40 suspected Islamist militants; hundreds of suspects detained in police dragnets; and new information on how the attack was financed by local sympathizers.
There have also been no reported extremist attacks since shortly after the restaurant killings.
The police raids followed an unprecedented crackdown over the summer, during which authorities arrested more than 14,000 people before July — most for petty crimes including theft and small-time drug smuggling. The arrests have continued, netting 1,200 suspected militants, some of whom are giving up useful information under questioning, intelligence officials say. But they refuse to say how many in total have been detained in recent months.
When asked to quantify the anti-militant operation’s success, Monirul Islam, the head of the police counter-terrorism and transnational crime units, said it was “60 to 70 per cent.”