Dhaka // “Stunned and speechless” was how a Bangladeshi politician on Tuesday described his horror on learning his son was among the suspects who murdered 20 hostages – most of them foreigners – at a Dhaka cafe.
Imtiaz Khan Babul said his 22-year-old son Rohan Imtiaz who was killed when commandos stormed the cafe on Saturday, had been a top-scoring student whose behaviour gave no hint he was radicalised before he disappeared last December. He said many young men from wealthy, educated families have been going missing.
“I was stunned and speechless to learn that my son had done such a heinous thing,” said a tearful Mr Babul, an official with the ruling Awami League party.
“I don’t know what changed him. There was nothing that would suggest that he was getting radicalised. He hardly read any religious books.”
His comments came as Bangladeshi police on Tuesday said that one of the men they shot dead during the rescue operation may have been a hostage, not a terrorist.
Police have named five Bangladeshi gunmen who stormed the restaurant in Dhaka’s diplomatic zone late on Friday. Most of the victims in the violence claimed by Islamic State were foreigners, from Italy, Japan, India and the United States.
It was one of the deadliest militant attacks in Bangladesh, where ISIL and Al Qaeda have claimed a series of killings of liberals and members of religious minorities in the past year.
Pictures of five young men clutching guns and grinning in front of a black flag were posted on an ISIL website hours after the attack, along with the claim of responsibility, but despite that, authorities have ruled out a foreign link.
Mr Babul said he had not seen Rohan since he left for India with his wife in December, leaving the couple’s three children in Dhaka.
In the months that followed Rohan’s disappearance, Mr Babul lobbied senior party officials to help find his only son and even scoured the city’s morgues. As he searched, he met other families who had suffered the same fate.
“I met so many parents whose boys had gone missing,” he said. “Even yesterday, one of them was saying that I was lucky that I got the body of my boy. Some of them are not so lucky.”
Mr Babul said he believed his son may have been “brainwashed” on the internet.
Bangladesh’s home minister has said the men behind Friday night’s attack at an upmarket cafe were highly educated and from wealthy families.
Security forces shot dead six men when they stormed the cafe, bringing the all-night siege to an end, while one suspected attacker was taken alive and is being questioned.
Police initially identified all six as suspected attackers, but on Tuesday they said they were looking into whether one was a kitchen worker being held hostage.
Relatives of Saiful Islam Chowkider raised the alarm after recognising the 39-year-old among the pictures of suspected attackers that police released after the siege.
“We protested. We said he was never a militant. He was hardworking man and one of the best pizza and pasta makers in Bangladesh,” Chowkider’s cousin Solaiman said.
“We went to the military, but they would not hand over the body, they said he was a suspect.”
Witnesses say the perpetrators of the attack, which ISIL has claimed, spared the lives of Muslims.
The mostly foreign victims included nine Italians, seven Japanese, a US citizen and a 19-year-old Indian student.
* Agence France-Presse and Reuters
