Militant killed in shootout with Bangladesh police hours into recapture

DHAKA, Feb. 24 (NsNewsWire) — The condemned militant, who was recaptured hours after escaping from police van, was killed in a shootout with law enforcers in central Tangail district early Monday.
Rakib Hasan of the banned Islamic militant group — Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB) — was on death row for murdering a medicine trader, reports Xinhua.
A gang of militants ambushed a prison van and snatched away three convicted JMB militants including Hasan in Mymensingh district, 122 km north of capital Dhaka, Monday afternoon.
About five hours after the incident, police recaptured Hasan from Tangail when he was fleeing.
Following his recapture, a team of law enforcers along with Hasan conducted a raid in Tangail to recapture the two other fugitive JMB operatives, Golam Mostafa, officer-in-charge of a police station in Tangail, told journalists.
As they reached in a place at around 4:30 a.m. local time Monday, he said, the culprits opened fire on the law enforcers in an apparent move to again snatch the JMB militant.
The JMB man was hit as the law enforcers retaliated with bullets triggering a gunfight, he added.
Mostafa said three policemen were also injured in the gunfight.
A policeman was killed and two others were injured as militants launched attack on the law enforcers to snatch away three top radicals in the country’s Mymensingh district, 122 km north of capital Dhaka.
Firoz Talukder, officer-in-charge of a police station in Mymensigh, Sunday told Xinhua that a van, which was carrying the convicts from a prison in central Gazipur district, some 37 km away of capital Dhaka, to a court in Mymensingh, was bombed.
According to the police, two of the dangerous JMB men who were freed during the daring attack were on death row while another was sentenced to life imprisonment.
Six leaders of the Islamic militant group were hanged in March 2007 by the Bangladeshi government for killing two judges in 2005. Among them were JMB chief Shaikh Abdur Rahman, an Afghan war veteran, and his second-in-command Siddiqul Islam Bangla Bhai.
The JMB militants killed two judges in southern Jhalkathi town in November 2005. The group made the headlines after they exploded nearly 500 bombs almost simultaneously on Aug. 17, 2005 across Bangladesh including capital Dhaka.
After the series of blasts, the militants carried out suicide attacks on different courts killing judges, lawyers and policemen. They had targeted courts as they considered the current judiciary as the stumbling block to their mission of establishing Islamic laws in this Muslim majority country.
In 2005, the JMB killed at least 28 people through bombings and suicide attacks in Bangladesh and wounded hundreds of others.