Where is Tahmid Khan?

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University of Toronto student Tahmid Hasib Khan

When Bangladeshi security forces stormed the Holey Artisans Bakery in Dhaka, they killed six people, "freed" at least eight people and discovered that twenty hostages had already been murdered by the terrorists, hours before. A handful of others who had been in the restaurant had either escaped or been released previously.

Those freed had been spared by the terrorists because they had been able to recite lines from the Koran or had in some way satisfied their captors that they were "true" Muslims.  

Five of the people killed were terrorists. The sixth man was the pizza chef at the restaurant. He was first described as being mistakenly shot in the crossfire. But the government subsequently designated him as the "sixth terrorist," - a confederate of the hostage takers, although to my knowledge, his alleged precise role has never been described.

Three of the freed people were apparently kept by the police for further questioning, and rumors began to circulate that they were also suspected of being collaborators with the hostage takers.

One of them was Tahmid Hasib Khan, 22 - a Bangladeshi citizen but also a current undergraduate at the University of Toronto.

During the siege, Khan was seen carrying a gun. However, other freed hostages have claimed that the terrorists persuaded him to briefly carry an unloaded gun against his will. Some credit him with persuading the terrorists to spare the lives of the surviving "Muslim" group.

A second possible reason for Khan's detention is that he went to the restaurant to meet two friends who happened to be from the same university as one of the terrorists.

As far as I know, these two items are the only reasons that have been publicly proposed as to why Tahmid Kahn might have been under any suspicion. And there seems to be no prior or independent evidence that Khan was a terrorist or had any terrorist links. He has been described by friends in Toronto as a well-liked if perfectly normal student:

We know Tahmid to be a passionate musician, a versatile stage actor and an extremely supportive friend. We know Tahmid to be a career-oriented, extremely hard-working and lovable character,” said the statement, released on Facebook. “We are praying for Tahmid’s quick release. We are praying that he’s allowed to be back with his family.

Khan's relatives, friends and other interested parties quickly began to lobby the police for his release. They claimed that he was epileptic and tried to make sure he had medical attention as well as legal representation. His father, a corporate executive, maintained a vigil outside the location where he was supposedly detained and was reportedly able to speak to his son twice, although the circumstances of that are unclear. 

Recently, however, events have taken a very disturbing turn.

One of the three detained men died in a hospital, and reports suggest he may have been beaten to death by police.

Then the police claimed that the other two men - Khan and a Bangladesh born British citizen, Hasnat Karim - had been released days before.

But neither of them has been seen.

Amnesty International recently publicized the case of Karim. For reasons that are not clear, they did not mention Khan.

Khan's father was subsequently admitted to a hospital after suffering a possible heart attack.

His mother has apparently suffered an emotional breakdown.

Where is Tahmid Khan?

Terror Attack at Bangladesh Eid Festival Kills 3

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Police move in on suspected terrorists at Eid festival

Literally every day now, there are multiple Muslim terror attacks around the world. But most get little or no coverage in the West as they occur in "third world" countries.

I've been reporting on events in Bangladesh because it has become an important focal point of the current Jihad. A Muslim country with some secular traditions is being forced to re-evaluate its compromise between Islam and Western values. In some ways its crackdown on "extremism" is turning out to be more aggressive than that of many Western countries. It is unclear to me where it will all lead.

You can follow part of the Bangladesh debate on Twitter at #DhakaAttack, among other places.      

Just days after the Dhaka restaurant massacre, Muslim terrorists struck at a massive outdoor Eid festival in Kishoreganj, fifty miles north east of Dhaka.

The crowd at the festival was variously estimated at 100,000 to 300,000.

The militants appear to have been hiding in a school at a security checkpoint. They threw a bomb at police and then attacked with machetes, initiating return gunfire less than five-hundred yards from the edge of the crowd.

Two policemen and a bystander - a Hindu woman - were killed. One of the policeman was hacked to death. Fourteen people were wounded.

Reports suggest that the terrorists may have intended to target Maulana Farid-uddin Masud, a "liberal" cleric who at the time was arriving by helicopter to speak to the crowd. Masud has been leading a campaign against the recent wave of Islamic terrorism.

Read more at the Daily Mail or Hindustan Times.

Dhaka Terrorist Was Inspired by Zakir Naik - Creator of the Chicago Based "Peace Phone"

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Dr. Zakir Naik

Five weeks ago I reported that the "first Islamic phone" or "Peace Phone," created by Dubai-based Dr. Zakir Naik (also spelled Nayak) was being shipped from Chicago. Naik is an internationally known Muslim writer and speaker. He is also a straight down the line death-to-apostates-and-gays, dhimmi-status-for-all-non-Muslims-and-it's-okay-to-have-sex-with-your-female-slaves sharia supporter who has also made many statements supportive of terrorism. He is banned from the UK, Canada and Malaysia.

Now The Daily Star, Bangladesh's main English paper, lists him as one of three figures that inspired the five Dhaka terrorists. One of the five, Rohan Imtiaz--the well-to-do son of a Bangladeshi politician--posted on Facebook that Naik's words and writings had urged him to become a terrorist.

Two of the five young militants who have slaughtered 20 innocent people Friday night at Holey Artisan Bakery used to follow three controversial Islamists -- Anjem Choudary, Shami Witness and Zakir Nayek. 

Militant killer Nibras Islam, 22, used to follow two alleged suspected recruiters of Islamic State -- Anjem Choudary and Shami Witness -- on Twitter in 2014. 

Another killer Rohan Imtiaz, son of an Awami League leader, propagated on Facebook last year quoting Peace TV’s controversial preacher Zakir Nayek “urging all Muslims to be terrorists”. 

A Pakistan-origin British citizen, 49-year-old Anjem is now facing trial in England for breaking the British anti-terrorism law. Shami Witness is the Twitter name of 24-year-old Mehdi Biswas of Bangalore in India, who is also facing trial for running propaganda for the IS. 

Shami was arrested in December 2014 following an investigation into his Twitter account which was last active in August 2014. Anjem’s twitter account became inactive from August 2015 after terror charges were brought against him. 

Dr Nayek is banned in UK, Canada and Malaysia and is a controversial figure in his home country India. He is wildly popular in Bangladesh through his Peace TV although his preaching often demeans other religions and even other Muslim sects. 

This means at least in the case Nibras and Rohan, they did not become radicalised overnight. They have been consuming radical materials for one to two years before finally disappearing in February-March and reappearing as “IS killers” Friday night at the Holey Artisan Bakery in Gulshan.

A spokesman for Naik's Islamic Research Foundation responded that Dr. Naik has many followers and he cannot be responsible for the actions of all of them.

But where did the young killer get the idea that Naik was "urging all Muslims to be terrorists"?

Three days ago, a Muslim death squad hacked to death twenty innocents at a restaurant in Dhaka. If you want a "Peace Phone" created by the man who inspired at least one of them, you can go to 2140 W. Fulton street in Chicago and buy one. 

"I'm hiding in the toilet with friends, I think we will be killed one by one"

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Tarishi Jain and Faraaz Hossain, two years ago

Among the slain hostages were three students who had been studying in the United States - Tarishi Jain, 19, an Indian studying at UC Berkeley, Faraaz Hossain, a Bangladeshi, about to enter Emory's Goizueta Business School and Abinta Kabir, 18, an American of Bangladeshi parentage who lived in Miami, Florida and was a freshman at Emory.

They were friends.

At some point during the siege, Tarishi Jain's father received a phone call from his daughter who was hiding in the bathroom with the two others. The article from The Times of India does not make it clear when the call was made and thus how long the group had survived in hiding. But at some point she and the others were killed by the terrorists before the restaurant was stormed by police.

Newspaper accounts claim that Jain's body bore the marks of torture. All three probably died by being stabbed and hacked to death with knives.

UPDATE: According Faraaz Hossain's nephew, who claims to have heard this account from one of then freed hostages, the terrorists offered Hossain - who may have appeared less Western or more Muslim - the chance to leave with some of the other Bangladeshis. He chose to stay with his friends.

Yesterday, the #DhakaAttack hashtag on Twitter was partly filled by people complaining that the Dhaka attack and its victims were not getting the same coverage as Orlando a few weeks before. To the extent that that was true, I think it was to some degree understandable. It was understandable for Americans to be focused on something happening to Americans in an American city, just as it's understandable that for the Bangladeshi and Indian public to have been riveted on the Dhaka attack for the last thirty-six hours.

I should add that one of the victims turned out to be American but the State Department announced this quite late and bizarrely did not identify the victim.

Abinta Kabir, outside Holey Artisan Bakery

And of course, there are Muslim terrorist attacks around the world literally every day now. Yesterday, two car bombs, planted by ISIS went off in Baghdad. The first, in a busy market and shopping area, killed over 125 people, many of them children.

My own view is that the statistics matter. It matters how many lost their lives. But just as 9/11 was in part made real for us by the individual pictures of the jumpers or the stories of the desperate phone calls made to loved ones by those trapped in the upper floors, we should, when we can, try not to forget that these "mass casualty" events happened to real human beings. I assume each of us can imagine being one of them. An obvious point, and it can't be made without sounding trite but there it is.

From the The Times of India:

AGRA/FIROZABAD: Sometime before 6 am on Saturday when 19-year-old Tarishi Jain's phone went dead, her father Sanjiv Jain, who had been waiting outside Gulshan Cafe through most of the night after he got to know that heavily armed terrorists had stormed the restaurant in upscale Dhaka and were butchering guests, got a call. 

It was from his daughter, cowering inside a toilet with two of her friends, Faraaz Ayaz Hossain and Abinta Kabir, hiding from the rat-tat-tat of gunfire outside the washroom's door. "Terrorists have entered the restaurant," she told her father, who was planning just a day earlier to bring his wife and two children to Firozabad in UP for a short holiday before Tarishi headed back to the US where she was an Economics undergraduate at the University of California. "I am very afraid and not sure whether I will be able to come out alive. They are killing everyone here."

It had been a long and harrowing night for Sanjiv as he gathered with dozens of anxious family and friends of those huddled in the cafe to know how the bloody strike on innocent and unarmed men and women would end. By the time the terrorists were neutralised, 20 people, mostly foreigners and among them Tarishi - the only Indian among the casualties - had died. 

Tarishi was a recipient of an internship with a Bangladesh bank through the Institute for South Asia Studies at her university in California. 

"After coming to know that Tarishi is among the hostages, we remained glued to our TV set the entire night and remained in touch with Sanjiv (her father) Rakesh Mohan Jain, Tarishi Jain's uncle. "She said, `I'm hiding in the toilet with friends, I think we will be killed one by one'. He was standing outside the cafe the whole time. We were in touch with him throughout," he said. 

Her brother Sanchit, who has done his engineering from Canada, had landed in Delhi a day earlier so that the family of four, along with mother Tulika, could all head to Firozabad — where Sanjiv's three brothers Rakesh, Rajiv and Ajit have a flourishing trade in glass — on Saturday. That family reunion was never to be. At the Jains' Suhag Nagar home in Firozabad, there is both anger and deep grief. "We don't want her to be cremated in the land where she was brutally murdered.