Dhaka-Bangladeshis held a national mourning ceremony for the civilians killed in a terrorist attack last week.
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The Japanese government has been putting family members on a government plane headed to Dhaka to help with the transport of the bodies back to Japan.
“We never imagined this”, said Babul, an official with the ruling Awami League party, in an interview with the BBC.
Seven militants who killed 20 people at a restaurant in Dhaka were local Bangladeshis and authorities had tried before to arrest five of them, police said, as investigators probed for possible links with global Islamist extremist groups.
The charges were filed at Gulshan Police Station at midnight, Inspector General of Police (IGP) AKM Shahidul Haque said.
“That’s what we’re absolutely riveted by”, said Kazi Anis Ahmed, a writer and publisher of the daily newspaper, the Dhaka Tribune. The official spoke on condition of anonymity, as he was not authorized to speak to the media about the ongoing investigation.
Police on Saturday night released the photos of the five militants and identified them as “Akash”, “Bikash”, “Don”, “Bandhon” and ‘Ripon.
The civilians, majority foreigners, were killed by Islamist militants who took them hostage during an hours-long siege that started Friday at a restaurant in the Bangladeshi capital.
Two had attended a private university in Malaysia, one of whom, Nibras Islam, was not particularly religious, according to a student who played football with him at a private college in Dhaka between 2009 and 2011.
Several crude videos taken from an apartment near the Holey Artisan Bakery show the man talking to the attackers, before being allowed to leave before paramilitary launched the rescue operation on Saturday. The man’s friends and police also said the one of the attackers was a student in the same department at the university where the man teaches.
The attackers stormed a restaurant in the diplomatic enclave popular with the expatriate community during the final days of the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan. Previously, most attacks were carried out by gangs of young men wielding cleavers and machetes and hacking into their victims before fleeing.
Identities of the five gunmen shot dead by police circulated quickly online after images of them posing with weapons prior to the attack were released by Amaq, the news agency of Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil). The government has dismissed those claims, as it did the Islamic State claim of responsibility for Friday’s attack. It urged people to exercise the “utmost prudence”, particularly in places frequented by foreigners, and to limit their activities to only what was necessary.
Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina and the Bangladesh Army said that one terrorist was captured alive from the site of the attack.
The coffins were draped in the Bangladeshi flag – a red disc on a green background.
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Nine Italians, seven Japanese, an Indian and an American were among the dead.
