DHAKA: Bangladeshi police shot dead an Islamist extremist accused of being one of the masterminds of last year’s deadly siege at a cafe during a pre-dawn raid in Dhaka on Friday.

The bodies of Nurul Islam Marzan and another man said to have been behind the murder of a Japanese national in 2015 were found after officers raided a property in the capital’s Rayer Bazar neighbourhood, police said.

“Marzan and his associate Saddam [Hossain] died in an encounter with police,” said Inspector General of Police A.K.M Shahidul Haque. “He [Marzan] was the operational commander of the July cafe attack. He was one of the masterminds of it.” Additional deputy commissioner Yusuf Ali told AFP police had found the body of another “suspected extremist” alongside Marzan.

Ali said that Marzan was “one of the masterminds” of the siege at the upmarket Holey Artisan Bakery on July 1 last year in which 18 foreign hostages were shot or hacked to death.

IS claimed responsibility for the cafe attack, posting images of the carnage as it happened and photos of the gunmen who had posed with the group’s black flag.

But Mohibul Islam Khan, the deputy chief of Dhaka police’s counterterrorism and transnational crime unit, said Marzan was known to be a member of JMB, joining the group after dropping out of Bangladesh’s Chittagong University.

“Along with Tamim [Ahmed Chowdhury], Marzan planned the Gulshan attack,” he said, referring to the Canadian citizen of Bangladeshi descent who police described as the main mastermind of the siege.

Chowdhury was killed in another raid outside the capital in August last year. Later police also arrested Marzan’s wife in a raid in the capital and last month she gave birth to a daughter in custody.

Police intelligence had found that Marzan organised the cafe siege and was its operational commander, said Khan.

Published in Dawn, January 7th, 2017