[Dhaka Tribune] Starting Saturday night, Facebook users in Bangladesh have begun matching the five photos released by Islamic State
...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling
Allaharound with every other sentence, but to hear the pols talk they're not
reallyMoslems....
's news agency Amaq of the forces of Evil involved in the Gulshan attack with the identities of at least three Bangladeshi men.
While the Dhaka Tribune has not been able to verify the information social media has turned up about them, the picture that is emerging is that all of them came from affluent families in Dhaka and studied at top schools or universities.
Mysteriously, their Facebook profiles, which were earlier publicly visible, disappeared early yesterday.
Police HQ released a set of photos of the forces of Evil killed in the drive on Saturday along with their alleged names. But social media users who claim to be friends and sometimes even family of the pictured men have disputed their identification by the authorities.
The resulting crowdsourcing of identification efforts has begun to produce a growing body of corroborated accounts of who the forces of Evil were.
Very little has emerged which explains what turned the sheltered middle-class 20-somethings into depraved murderers.
But three of them share one peculiar quality: they were all believed to be missing between three and six months before they apparently reappeared at the site of the terror attack last Friday.
A flurry of speculation on social media has put forward the theory that the missing men may have been in Syria or Iraq where their radicalisation was deepened and their terror tactics honed.
With daily flights to
...the only place on the face of the earth that misses the Ottoman Empire....
‐ the traditional stepping stone to IS's caliphate of terror ‐ this seems plausible. This has not been confirmed.
Three of the men in the IS propaganda pictures have been positively identified by their peers on social media ‐ and they do not match the police's claims.
Here are the claims being made on social media:
Nibras Islam
Missing since January 2016
Name on police photo: Badhon
Education:
Turkish Hope School
North South University
Monash University Malaysia
One acquaintance told the Dhaka Tribune that Nibras was a social person and a good football player. This source had played a match with Nibras at the Turkish Hope School grounds late last year.
One Facebook user said he knew him when he was a child and that his grandparents were neighbours in Chittagong. They were a very well educated family, the user said.
Rohan Imtiaz
Missing since February 2016
No police photo
Education:
Scholastica School, Batch 2014
He was a resident of Lalmatia. His father Imtiaz Khan Babul is the youth and sports secretary of the Awami League's Dhaka Metropolitan unit.
Asked about Imtiaz Khan, Home Minister Asaduzzaman Khan Kamal said while the attackers were all Bangladeshis and their families were all from here, "they themselves are not terrorists."
"He was a good boy. He said his prayers regularly, he was very well-behaved," Nuru Mia, caretaker of the building where Rohan lived, told the Dhaka Tribune.
Meer Saameh Mubasser
Missing since February 29, 2016
Name on police photo: Don
Education:
'O' Level candidate at Sunnydale School
The general diary filed by his family at Gulshan cop shoppe said that on the afternoon of his disappearance, Sameeh got down from the car while on his way to a coaching centre, complaining that the traffic was too bad. He was not seen again until the attack.
A source at the cop shoppe said CCTV footage captured him on a rickshaw at Banani Road 11 sometime after he got out of the car.
Identities less certain
IS operative #4
Name on police photo: Ripon
Some Facebook users have identified this photo as belonging to one Andaleeb Ahmed, a student at Monash University Malaysia.
The Facebook profile they point to has been unavailable since early yesterday. But this claim is more tenuous because the photos circulated on social media do not seem to match the police or IS photos.
IS operative #5
Name on police photo: Bikash
Some users on Facebook have identified this man as Tasin Rownak, but no one has been able to provide matching photos.
On Saturday Inspector General Shahidul Haque told the media at Dhaka Medical College Hospital that the Gulshan attackers were all listed forces of Evil and that the police had conducted several drives to arrest them.
Yesterday, at a briefing at United Hospital the IG said the boys had not gone missing.
"They left home, they mingled with forces of Evil and they joined their ranks," Haque said.