The Bangladesh hostage siege, in which 28 people were killed late last week, is defying explanation for a lot of officials in the country, as initial expectations that the attackers would be men from poor families radicalized at Islamist-run religious schools.
Instead, what they’re finding is a surprisingly posh collection of attackers, mostly from well-off families and very well-educated at the country’s better schools. The names haven’t all been released, but one man, Imtiaz Khan, a top political figure and deputy secretary-general of the nation’s Olympic Committee, said he had been informed his son was among the attackers, saying that there was never anything to indicate he was leaning toward radical Islam.
The Bangladeshi government insists that all the attackers were linked with Jamaat-ul Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB), a banned militant group, but again this isn’t in keeping with anything any of the families of the attackers knew about them.
The government obviously isn’t nearly as clear on events as they’d presented, either, with reports that some of the rescued hostages are now being held by the government for questioning as they try to make sense of a stunning attack.
Home Minister Asaduzzaman Khan gloomily concluded that joining ISIS had become “fashionable” among the young people these days, though again that appears to be an attempt to rationalize an incident which appears to defy easy explanation.