The militants involved in the Sholakia attack have confessed that their main target was the Eid congregation, a senior RAB official said yesterday. The attackers were challenged by police near Azimuddin High School in the vicinity of their target, forcing them to retaliate by hurling bombs at the law enforcers and chopping them, said Rajib Kumar Deb, commander of the Kishoreganj RAB-14. According to the attackers’ confession during preliminary interrogation, four militants had gone to Nilganj area on July 1 to carry out a recce of Sholakia Eidgaah and put the final touches to their plan.
Following this, one of the youths involved in the attack rented an apartment about a kilometre away from Sholakia Eidgah. The apartment is on the ground floor of an under-construction building on Nilganj Road. The youth posed as a local college student and told the house owner that he and three of his friends would be staying there.
“They had rented the apartment temporarily, only to carry out their deadly mission,” said the investigating officer of the case, Muhammad Murshed Jaman.
Many locals believe that the assailants might have taken the nearby rail track and walked up to Azimuddin High School before being challenged by law enforcers.
In a related development, police buried the body of Abir Rahman, one of the militants, at a local graveyard in Kishoreganj amid tight security on Monday evening. The graveyard’s caretaker, Moulana Mahtab Uddin, led the namaj-e-janaza of the slain student of North South University, but no people attended it.
The body had been lying for four days at Zahurul Islam Medical College Hospital mortuary at Bajitpur.
Police took the initiative to bury the body as Abir’s family had refused to accept it, said Kishoreganj Model Police Station officer-in-charge Mir Musharraf Hossain.
Quoting Abir’s father, his uncle Shahidul Islam told reporters that they did not want to take the body as he was involved in a militant attack.
In another development, a seven-member CID team had gone to the rented apartment on Sunday and seized the pillows, beddings, napkins and tooth brushes used by the militants. These materials were then taken to Dhaka for DNA tests. On July 7, at least four people, including two policemen, were killed and 11 injured in a bomb attack and consequent gunfight after terrorists attacked a temporary police check post neat Azimuddin High School in the vicinity of Sholakia Eidgah around 9.30 am. The attackers later hacked at the injured policemen.