Dhaka: A suspected extremist blew himself up and another was shot dead after Bangladesh’s antiterrorism officers raided their hideout early on Sunday, police said.
Police cordoned off a one-storey building in a remote village in the western district of Jhenaidah on a tip-off that extremists were holed up there.
“There was an exchange of fire between counter-terrorism police and the extremists. An extremist was killed,” district police chief Mizanur Rahman said.
“And when we came closer to the building, another extremist carried out a suicide blast. He died on the spot,” he said, adding two police officers were also injured in the blast.
He said the extremists were members of a new faction of the Jamayetul Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB), blamed for a wave of deadly attacks against religious minorities and foreigners in the Muslim-majority country.
These include a major attack on a Dhaka cafe last July in which 22 people were killed, most of them foreigners.
Daesh claimed that attack and several others, but Dhaka insists they were the work of home-grown terrorist groups.
Police have arrested scores of suspected extremists and killed more than 60 people since the cafe attack.
