On Friday night, seven gunmen launched an attack on a cafe in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh. It was the deadliest terror attack ever to occur in the nation’s history. The attack quickly turned into a hostage situation, and 33 customers and employees were held captive in the cafe until they were rescued by Bangladeshi troops 11 hours later. Of those 33 hostages, 13 were rescued Saturday morning when the troops stormed the cafe. Sadly, the other 20 did not survive.
Of the 20 hostages that lost their lives, three of them were U.S. college students. Two of the students, Abinta Kabir and Faraaz Hossain, studied at Emory University. Kabir was a sophomore who went to Dhaka to visit family and friends and Hossain was a business student at Emory’s Goizueta Business School. The third, 19-year-old Tarushi Jain, was an Indian citizen who attended the University of California at Berkeley. Many of the other victims were Italian nationals, and police are working to identify the remaining victims.
According to witnesses that survived, the gunmen came in and immediately began shooting in the air to incite fear. Loaded with pistols as well as knives and bombs, they then began to launch explosives around the cafe. A handful of employees managed to escape, and some even went so far as jumping off the roof to get away. According to the father of one of the surviving victims, the gunmen asked the hostages to recite the Koran, and if they were able to, they were spared. If they couldn’t, they were tortured.
The Bangladeshi troops killed all but one of the gunmen when they stormed in, and they were able to take the seventh one alive. Two police officers were killed during the standoff as well.
Though ISIS has claimed responsibility for the attack, U.S. officials believe al Qaeda may actually be the group behind this. According to one official, al Qaeda has “demonstrated a more capable presence in Dhaka over the past few months than ISIS, and so far, all of its attacks in the nation have been in the capital.”
The Prime Minister of Bangladesh, Sheikh Hasina Wazed, has declared two days of mourning on Sunday and Monday to honor the victims.
Prayers up for Bangladesh and all of the victims.
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