2 militants linked to Dhaka café attack killed in April raid: Cops

Two “Neo JMB” militants who supplied arms and collected fund for Dhaka café attack were killed in a raid in their Chapainawabganj hideout on April 27, police said today.

Law enforcers came to know about the two suspected militants’ -- Basharuzzaman Chocolate and Mizanur Rahman alias Chhoto Mizan -- link with the café attack in Gulshan from Sohel Mahfuz, another bomb supplier whom they arrested on July 8.

Chocolate was a fund collector for “Neo JMB” as the government called it while Chhoto Mizan was one of the suppliers of grenades and firearms used in the Gulshan cafe attack, a top counterterrorism official disclosed it at the monthly crime conference of DMP today.

Monirul Islam, chief of the Counter Terrorism and Transnational Crime (CTTC) unit of Dhaka Metropolitan Police (DMP) confirmed the death of the two militants in the Shibganj raid, meeting sources said.

Sohel, who was arrested along with three accomplices in the bordering Shibganj upazila of Chapainawabganj, is known as an explosives expert and the bomb supplier for last year's Gulshan café attack, according to police.

On the evening of July 1, five gunmen burst into the eatery and started firing indiscriminately. They turned off all the lights, held the diners hostage and sorted out targets through a test of reciting verses from the Holy Quran.

They then brutally killed the hostages with guns and machetes, and used the victims' phones to publish images of the bodies on the social media.

Around 12 hours later, para commandos stormed the restaurant and found traces of mindless butchery. Twenty hostages were brutally murdered with the café's floor strewn with bodies.   

During the 12-hour raid on the terror den at a mango orchard on April 27 four militant suspects holed up there blew themselves up.

At that time police only confirmed that Rafiqul Islam alias Abu, an operative of the militant outfit was among the dead.