IS claims Friday suicide bombing in Bangladesh elite forces camp
The group’s announcement came hours after a suspected militant was shot dead by security forces near Dhaka.
The Islamic State group on Saturday claimed responsibility for suicide bomb attack on a camp for Bangladesh’s elite security forces the previous day.
“A caliphate soldier in Bangladesh carried out a martyrdom operation with an explosive belt in a camp for special forces in Dhaka,” the group announced in its daily al-Bayan radio bulletin.
The group’s announcement came hours after a suspected militant was shot dead by security forces when he tried to cross a checkpoint run by Bangladesh’s elite Rapid Action Battalion in Dhaka.
On Friday, Home minister Asaduzzaman Khan said a man carrying explosives entered the RAB camp near the Dhaka international airport on Friday morning. The explosives went off after he was challenged by two RAB men, wounding them both but causing no other casualties.
The camp, which hosts a mix of elite police, army and air force personnel, has since been cordoned off.
RAB spokesman Mufti Mahmud Khan told reporters the bomb exploded after the man was confronted by RAB men, although it was not clear whether the detonation was deliberate.
The spokesman said the man’s identity was not known, but that the attack was similar in style to that of previous ones by Islamist extremists.
The incident followed a series of raids on suspected militant hideouts in Bangladesh, which has suffered a series of Islamist attacks in recent years.