Information from Soheil resulted in cafe attack planner Rashed’s arrest: DMP chief

Soheil Mahfuz, one of the masterminds behind the deadly attack on Holey Artisan Bakery, has helped law enforcers to arrest his accomplice, Aslam Hossain Rashed, says the chief of Dhaka Metropolitan Police (DMP).

DMP Commissioner Asaduzzaman Mia said at an event in Mirpur on Friday that "the information provided by Soheil led to the arrest of Rashed."

Rashed, who also operated under the aliases Rashedul Islam and 'Rash', was arrested from a bus stand at Singra in the north-western district of Natore in the early hours on Friday.

Rashed's capture means six suspects of the 2016 Gulshan cafe attack are now in custody. Now, only Hadisur Rahman Sagar, who also allegedly supplied weapons from Jessore, remains at large.

Later in the day, the key suspect of the 2016 café attack was brought to the Detective Branch offices in Dhaka. He will be taken to court on Saturday, police said.

Mia said, “The militants who had launched the attack on Holey Artisan Bakery, they were killed on spot. Later, police investigation led to Soheil Mahfuz’s arrest.

“He told us that he smuggled weapons and explosives into Bangladesh and gave them to Rashed. Rashed later supplied them to other militants including Neo-JMB leader Tamim Chowdhury.”

Both Soheil and Rashed belong to the Jama'atul Mujahideen Bangladesh or JMB's revived faction, known to police as the Neo-JMB, and were ‘very close’ to Tamim, said the DMP commissioner.

Tamim, a Bangladeshi-Canadian, headed the Neo-JMB before being shot dead in a police raid following the attack.

Asaduzzaman Mia said Rashed was also one of those who planned the deadliest terror attack in Bangladesh’s history on Jul 1 last year.

Five gunmen had stormed the upscale Holey Artisan Bakery and O' Kitchen at Gulshan and killed 22 people, including 17 foreigners and two police officials, during an overnight siege. They were eventually shot dead by commandoes in a raid.

Eight suspects who were involved in its planning died in several anti-terror raids that followed across the country.

Police on the first anniversary of the attack said they needed to capture five terrorists before submitting the chargesheet for its investigation.

Of the five, capturing Rashed, Soheil and Basharuzzaman aka 'Chocolate' was vital, the DMP’s counter-terrorism unit chief Monirul Islam said earlier.

Then on Jul 8, Soheil alias Abdus Sabur Khan, who has confessed to supplying the grenades and other weapons used in the attack, was arrested from Chapainawaganj’s Shibganj.

Police, after the arrest, were able to confirm the deaths of Basharuzzaman and Choto Mizan during an earlier raid on a terror hideout at Shibganj in April.