DHAKA: A British national and a student at a Canadian university have been arrested on suspicion of involvement in last month\u2019s deadly siege at a cafe in Bangladesh\u2019s capital, police said Thursday.
\nHasnat Karim, a Bangladeshi origin British citizen, and Tahmid Khan, who is a student at the University of Toronto, were detained on Wednesday night, police spokesman A.K.M Shahidur Rahman told .
\n“We can confirm that they were arrested under Section 54 of CrPC (criminal procedure),” Rahman said, referring to a law under which police can detain someone for suspicion over any crime.
\nRahman said that police had applied to magistrates for permission to remand Karim and Khan in custody for 10 days but there has been no response to their application so far.
\nKarim and Khan were both inside the Holey Artisan cafe when gunmen raided the premises on the night of July 1, taking a group of mainly Western diners hostage and then killing 20 of them, along with two policemen.
\nBut neither man has been seen in public since the end of the siege when commandos stormed the cafe in Dhaka\u2019s upmarket Gulshan neighbourhood on the morning of July 2.
\nTheir families have previously said that both Karim and Khan were being held by the security services, insisting there is no evidence to link them to the attackers and that they were no more than innocent bystanders.
\nReports in local media said both were being investigated for suspicious activity during the siege. They said Khan was seen holding a firearm and Karim strolling with the attackers on the roof.
\nThe 47-year-old Karim was a lecturer at Bangladesh\u2019s private North-South University in Dhaka which was the alma mater of two of the five attackers who were gunned down at the end of the siege.
\nMore recently, he had been working as a director at his father\u2019s engineering company in Dhaka.
\nThe 22-year-old Khan, who is a Bangladeshi citizen, was back in his homeland while on leave from his university in Canada.
\nPolice earlier this week named a Canadian citizen called Tamim Chowdhury as the mastermind of the attack, offering a reward of up to $25,000 for any information leading to his arrest.
\nThe siege at the Holey Artisan cafe was by far the deadliest in a string of attacks claimed by Islamist groups which have blighted Bangladesh over the last three years.
\nThe so-called Islamic State organisation claimed responsibility for the attack and the gunmen were all pictured posing with IS flags in images posted on a website affiliated to the group.
\nPrime Minsiter Sheikh Hasina\u2019s government has said however that the attack was the work of a homegrown Islamist group, insisting international militant groups have not got a foothold in Bangladesh.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
DHAKA: A British national and a student at a Canadian university have been arrested on suspicion of involvement in last month\u2019s deadly siege at a cafe in Bangladesh\u2019s capital, police said Thursday. Hasnat Karim, a Bangladeshi origin British citizen, and Tahmid Khan, who is a student at the University of Toronto, were detained on Wednesday […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-487","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-world"],"yoast_head":"\n