Report in bdnews24.com, Sept 8, 2017 at 22:20 hrs
As many as 17 large bombs, 50 small ones, 30 grenades, 100 locally made weapons, 10 kg gunpowder, three kg sulphur, 15 kg splinters and numerous other materials were recovered from the hideout on Friday.
The elite police unit’s spokesperson Mufti Mahmud Khan then announced the end of the operation on Friday afternoon.
He spoke to the media in front of the six-storey house where a militant suspect set off a series of suicide explosions on Tuesday. The building at Bardhanbarhi on Mazar Road has four units on each floor.
Its media wing Director Khan also said they found 23 refrigerators after searching another section of the floor on Thursday but found nothing inside the refrigerators, except for two of those were connected to improvised explosive devices or IEDs.
Earlier, 10 powerful explosives, 30 bottle-shaped explosives, 50 local weapons, sulphur, 10 kilograms of gunpowder were seized on the fifth floor.
Suspect ‘Abdullah’, an alleged member of the banned group Jama’atul Mujahideen Bangladesh or JMB, rented two units on the fourth floor.
The 45-year-old mechanic of electronic devices had also been using half of the fifth floor to raise pigeons that he used to sell for a living.
RAB surrounded the building on Monday midnight after receiving information from two militant suspects captured earlier in that day during a raid in Tangail.
Sixty-five residents of the building were moved away to a nearby school on Tuesday morning. They were seen leaving with stuff like clothes, money and medicine later.
Abdullah, his two wives, two children and two unidentified employees, remained inside the flat on the fourth floor.
RAB tried to persuade Abdullah to surrender and told the media in the evening that he had agreed to come out of the building.
But around 9:45pm, three explosions rocked the area, triggering a fire in the building.
The explosions created a hole as wide as two feet on the fourth floor through which flames spread to the third floor, the RAB said.
The law enforcers on Wednesday found seven skulls and charred remains.
Residents of the other units had left their homes locked, which RAB might also search eventually, said Khan.
It took the reporters inside the building and allowed entry to the residents of the other flats half an hour before calling off the operation.
One of them told bdnews24.com that RAB said they would be able to move in again after getting the permission from related authorities on Saturday.
Khan said the relevant authorities had been informed about the structural damage of the building. “They will come and decide whether it is safe to live in the house.”
As the crime scene, the control of the fourth and sixth floors will remain with the law enforcers until the investigation is complete, he added.
The landlord of the house and a night watchman of the area have been arrested in a case over the raid.
In the open space to the fifth floor, some of Abdullah’s pigeons lay dead while some others looked ill.
Khan said they were taking care of the pigeons and would hand those over to proper authorities later.http://bdnews24.com/bangladesh/2017/09/08/rab-finds-more-bomb-making-materials-inside-mirpur-terror-den
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