FOR four days all eyes in Bangladesh were on Atia Mahal, a lime-green, five-floor apartment block in the north-eastern city of Sylhet. The police cordoned off the building on March 24th after receiving word that a group of Islamic militants had holed up in one of its flats. But it was only on March 27th that a special anti-terrorism unit managed to kill the last of the four besieged terrorists. Two days earlier, one of the four had put on a suicide-vest and blown himself up at the police cordon some 400 metres from the hideout, killing six people and injuring 50. It was the first indiscriminate suicide-attack on civilians in Bangladesh.
Islamic State, the jihadist group that runs a dwindling portion of Syria and Iraq, claimed responsibility for the attack, its 28th in Bangladesh since 2015. The deadliest of those was an assault on a restaurant in Dhaka, the capital, last year, in which 22 civilians, two policemen and five terrorists were killed. The government insists—to near-universal disbelief—that the perpetrators are a new faction of a home-grown group called Jamayetul Mujahideen Bangladesh. Either way, the government does...Continue reading
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