No group has claimed responsibility for the attack.
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Four people, including two policemen, a woman and a suspected assailant, died in the attack near Sholakia Eidgah where hundreds of thousands had gathered for Eid congregation this morning.
“They first threw a small bomb targeting police and then attacked them with machetes”.
The largely Muslim country of around 160 million has been in a state of heightened security since last Friday’s siege, with police checkpoints established throughout the capital city of Dhaka and a wide-ranging effort by law enforcement ongoing to identify others who may have been recruited into terrorist activity.
The cleric who led the Kishoreganj prayer, Maolana Farid Uddin Masuod, has been an outspoken critic of a recent wave of attacks by extremists and strongly condemned Thursday’s killings.
The Eid attack took place at around 9:30 a.m. local time, 30 minutes before the prayers, which went on as scheduled.
Last Friday, Dhaka witnessed an unprecedented terror attack in which 20 hostages and two policemen were killed by Islamist terrorists. “We have to say firmly we will give Daesh and fundamentalist terrorism no respite, all the more so after this attack”.
“Social media has become a fertile ground for recruiting militants”, the head of the telecoms regulator Shahjahan Mahmood told AFP.
Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, at an Id reception at her residence, said, “Those who are carrying out assaults even in Id congregations are enemies of Islam and humanity”.
The terrorists’ “aim is to weaken social resistance against extremism, creating panic in people’s mind”, the imam, Maulana Fariduddin Masud, told the official BSS news agency.
It was one of the deadliest attacks ever in Bangladesh, where al Qaeda and Islamic State have made competing claims for a series of killings of liberals and members of religious minorities in the past year.
A new Isis propaganda video released on Wednesday threatened more attacks in Bangladesh, where the group announced its expansion previous year.
Media reports quoted Bangladesh Information Minister Hasanul Haq Inu as saying that the target of the attack was a police convoy patrolling the religious gathering.
Muhammad Zamir, a former senior Foreign Ministry official, said the country was “going through a crisis”. “They are anti-Islam, anti-religion and anti-government”, he said.
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After the cafe attack, a highly-placed source in the government said Bangladesh was taking the help of a friendly country in the investigation into the carnage.
