“Two of our officers have died and a few have sustained serious injuries”.
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Kishoreganj ASP Obaidul Hasan said the blasts spread panic among thousands who were beginning to gather near the ground, but the prayers were not disrupted, bdnews24.Com reported.
The government has dismissed claims of responsibility by the Islamic State group for past attacks, including last Friday’s hostage-taking.
However Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s government has consistently denied global jihadist networks have gained a foothold and have said the weekend attack in Dhaka was carried out by a local Islamist group.
The police killed one of the attackers and arrested two others, Hossain said.
Ms Hasina also asked the parents who have lost their children to cooperate with police in finding the missing youth by providing them with photos and necessary information and not just sit back by filing a General Diary missing complaint. A suspected attacker was also killed and another was captured with bullet wounds.
Police said that two of the attackers have been held while media reported the arrest of three persons.
Police said one constable was dead and at least 13 others were injured.
Nine Italians were among 20 hostages – 18 of them foreigners – slain by five Islamist militants in last Friday’s assault on the Holey Artisan bakery in Dhaka’s diplomatic zone. However, a deputy inspector general of police said it appeared the same group that engineered the Gulshan attack was involved in the attempt to disrupt Thursday’s prayer service at Kishoreganj in central Bangladesh.
At least one of the bombs exploded during the prayer at the sprawling Sholakia grounds, a large field where hundreds of thousands of people gathered nearly every year since the early 19th century to pray on the occasion of Eid.
Islamist gunmen head stormed a popular restaurant in Dhaka’s posh diplomatic enclave last Friday killing 22 people, majority foreigners from Italy, Japan, India and the United States in an attack claimed by the ISIS.
The Islamic scholar said he believes firmly that militants’ “acts of. mayhem and killing indeed go against the spirit of Islam”, and in fact are “attempts to distort the tenets of the Quran”.
“In the name of Islam, they are launching attacks near the holy site of the tomb of Prophet Muhammad”, in Medina, Saudi Arabia, the imam told VOA.
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Bangladesh’s Information Minister Hasanul Haq Inu again portrayed the latest attack as being created to topple Hasina. “They are against the normal religious practices of the country”, he said. Critics have said Sheikh Hasina’s administration is in denial about the nature of the threat posed by extremists and accuse her of trying to exploit the attacks to demonise her domestic political opponents. “We don’t know which group they belong to but they are suspected members of (an) extremist terrorist group”.
