DHAKA : Gunmen opened fire at a Shi’ite mosque in Bangladesh on Thursday, leaving one dead and three wounded, police said, in the second such attack on the country’s tiny Shia Muslim community.
The shooting, which took place in the northwestern Bogra district during evening prayer, came hours after police killed a top militant, who was the main suspect behind last month’s bombing of a Shi’ite shrine that left two people dead and wounded dozens. The attackers entered the mosque and opened fire on the devotees after locking the main gate and then fled immediately after the shooting, local police official Ahsan Habib said. Police had conducted a raid in the Mirpur area of the capital Dhaka late on Wednesday, touching off a brief gunbattle in which Al Bani, identified as the head of the military wing of the militant group Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen, was killed.
Five other members of the Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen were picked up from the raid and paraded before reporters on Thursday. Muslim-majority Bangladesh has seen a rise in Islamist violence in recent months, with two foreigners and four secular writers and a publisher killed this year, some of which have been claimed by Islamic State.
The government rejects those claims and says local militants are involved in the killings. Critics say the government is whipping up a climate of fear to go after its political rivals. Tensions have rising in the country since Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina launched a crackdown on militants, putting several leaders on trial for war crimes committed during the 1971 war of independence.