Staff Reporter :
At least two suspected militants have been killed in explosions when the Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) personnel raided a house at Bosila in the city’s Mohammadpur, suspecting it to be a militant den.
A bomb defusing unit and a dog squad entered the tin-shed house around 10:00am on Monday and the operation was formally closed around 4:00pm.
The RAB Director General (DG) Benazir Ahmed told the reporters while visiting the spot on Monday morning.
“The bodies have been blown apart in the explosions. We will have to identify them through DNA profiling,” said the RAB’s DG.
The tin-shed single-storied house in Metro Housing Limited caught fire when bomb disposal was sweeping the area, the DG said.
Mufti Mahmud Khan, Director of Rapid Action Battalion’s (RAB) media wing, told newsmen on the spot, “At least two militants might have been killed inside the house. There is possibility of more unexploded IEDs (improvised explosive device) there.”
RAB evacuated nearby residents in the wee hours, and, until now, were keeping the area under a tight security cordon. The suspected militant hideout at Bosila, on the edge of Dhaka city, is located in the middle of a cluster of single-storied tin-shed houses.
RAB cordoned off one of the houses around 2:45am on information that it was a hideout of top terror outfit Jama’atul Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB).
They called out the caretaker of the house, Sohag, and his wife and knocked at the door of “the militants”. They were greeted with several gunshots from inside.
After RAB retreated & tragically, several explosions were heard around 3:30am. One big explosion was blasted at 4:45am.
RAB’s Additional DG Colonel Jahangir Alam said that blast blew apart the roof of the tin-shed building.
Four persons, including house-owner Wahab, the caretaker, his wife and the Imam of a nearby mosque, had been detained for questioning.
Owner Wahab told lawmen, two persons identified themselves as van-pullers and rented the house a few months ago. They identified themselves as Sujan and Suman, They were supposed to leave in this month.
None of the locals could say that they never saw them pulling vans. Some said they didn’t even know that the tenants, aged between 23 and 25, were living there.
Meanwhile, Mohammadpur Police Station sources have said that no tenant information was sent to police regarding the tenants renting the place.
The other tenants in the area did know about the forms supplied by police personnel. Police have not provided the forms to tenants, locals said. Seeking anonymity, a landlord said that they did not provide tenant registration forms as Mohamadpur and Hazaribagh police stations did not seek information about the boarders following the previous dispute on jurisdiction in the territory.
