NEW DELHI (AP) – The young men had been missing for months. Their families sensed something was wrong. Some had come from privileged backgrounds, had grown up loved and were educated in top schools. They had bright futures.
It wasn’t until the horror of the weekend hostage crisis in Bangladesh’s capital unfolded that they learned their sons had become radicalized as religious extremists and launched one of the country’s deadliest attacks in recent years.
The young men, armed with knives, bombs and automatic firearms, engaged in a gun battle with police, killing two and wounding more, then seized a popular restaurant in a Dhaka neighborhood on Friday night and held some 35 people hostage. Over the next few hours, they would kill 20 of their captives – including nine Italians, seven Japanese, an Indian teenager and three students at American universities. A witness said some victims were tortured when they could not recite verses from the Quran.
“This is very painful. He killed innocent people,” said the aunt of one of the attackers, Rohan Imtiaz, whose father is a leader in Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s governing Awami League party.
“We sensed that Rohan was changing and his behavior increasingly became different,” she told the Associated Press in disbelief.