Bangladesh police shoot dead militant armed with explosives

Bangladesh security personnel frisk a traveler at a checkpoint at the entrance of Hazrat Shah Jalal International Airport in Dhaka on March 17, 2017. (Photo by AFP)

Police in Bangladesh have shot and killed a suspected militant trying to cross a checkpoint in the country’s capital, Dhaka.

Bangladesh’s elite Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) said on Saturday that officers opened fire on the attacker as he tried to enter a check-post with “a motorbike and explosives” in Dhaka’s southeastern district of Khilgaon.

The unidentified assailant was confirmed dead on the spot.

Two members of the elite force were also injured during the attempted bombing attack and have been admitted to a nearby hospital, according to RAB officials.

The latest development took place just a day after a bomber blew himself up at a military camp near the capital’s international airport.

In a separate incident last week, four suspected members of the banned Jamayetul Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB) militant group were killed in a police raid on their hideout outside in the country’s restive east.

The militants had opened fire at police and hurled grenades before ultimately blowing themselves up to avoid arrest.

Although many of the terror attacks conducted by local extremist groups in Bangladesh in the past year have been claimed by the Daesh and al-Qaeda terrorist groups, the government of Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina says local radical outfits, particularly the JMB, have also been responsible.

The militant group is blamed for a series of deadly attacks, including a café siege in Dhaka last July, when 22 people, including 18 foreign hostages, were killed.

Since the bloody café attack in Dhaka, local security forces have been staging a massive crackdown on radical groups, killing nearly 50 suspected militants, including what they have identified as the founders of a new JMB faction.