Hostages were held for a 12 hour ordeal at a bakery in Dhaka, Bangladesh. The bodies of 20 victims killed during the event are yet to be identified by authorities. The nationalities of the victims are as follows: seven Japanese, nine Italians, one Indian, two Bangladeshis and one U.S. citizen of Bangladeshi origin.<\/p>\n
They were killed by stabbings and hackings.<\/p>\n
Bangladeshi media stated that gunmen entered the caf\u00e9 and fired their guns at 9.20pm. A member of the kitchen staff, Mohammad Jasimuddin, recounts, \u201cThere were about 50 to 60 staff inside. These people came and opened fire. We thought they were dacoits<\/em> [bandits] and would leave after looting money and valuables.<\/p>\n \u201cI heard them screaming Allahu Akbar [God is great] and firing shots. We thought they\u2019d leave in 15 to 20 minutes, instead they went upstairs to the second floor [that was] under construction. They were firing from there.\u201d<\/p>\n Customers hid under tables and chairs, a group of 8 civilians were locked in a bathroom by the gunmen after hiding there.<\/p>\n The police, who reached the spot within 7 minutes of the incident, were fired at by the gunmen. A local police station chief, Mohammed Salahuddin, was tragically killed in the gun fire along with another officer, Ashraful Karim, the assistant police commissioner and Salahuddin\u2019s immediate superior.<\/p>\n A surprising twist is that the attackers were recognised and known by many after their images spread online.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat’s really puzzling is the background of these attackers,\u201d said Faiz Sobhan of Dhaka-based think tank, Bangladesh Enterprise Institute. \u201cThey were normal regular guys who hung out at cafes, played sports, had Facebook pages. … This is a new trend in radicalization.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Hostages were held for a 12 hour ordeal at a bakery in Dhaka, Bangladesh. The bodies of 20 victims killed during the event are yet to be identified by authorities. The nationalities of the victims are as follows: seven Japanese, nine Italians, one Indian, two Bangladeshis and one U.S. citizen of Bangladeshi origin. They were […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":19,"featured_media":15500,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39,3,112],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15499","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-international-news","category-news","category-top-stories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15499","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/19"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15499"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15499\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15500"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15499"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15499"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15499"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}