Bengaluru: As the body of Indian teenager Tarishi Jain was consigned to the fkames in Delhi by her distraught family on Monday, and Bangladesh's Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina led her nation in paying homage to the 20 hostages who were butchered on friday night in the Bangladeshi capital, the reason for the 12 hour delay before Bangladeshi forces launched a rescue operation is not the only development that has set off a furore in Dhaka.
Bangladeshi security experts said the seven terrorists, stayed on inside the Holey Artisan Bakery well after they had killed all the hostages shortly after they stormed the eatery Friday night, making no attempt to escape, despite the fact that there was little or no security around the restaurant.
"This was inexplicable. There was no security worth its name for at least another 12 hours until police and commandos launched their attack to rescue hostages, the next morning," a Bangladeshi security expert said, requesting anonymity.
"One reason could be that they had been brainwashed into believing that to enter 'jannat' (heaven) they must be martyred, and die at the hands of the soldiers."
He said the terrorists' links to ISIS was proved by the fact that they spent the night uploading and sending pictures of their victims' bloodied bodies to the ISIS website Amaq.
The Bangla terror expert also warned that like ISIS, who are made up of former members of former Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein's Baathists, Bangladesh was similarly awash with disgruntled former members of the border force, the Bangladesh Rifles, who had been discharged by Sheikh Hasina following the 2009 mutiny.
There was also concern over the radicalization of educational institutions, he said. One of the terrorists was an alumnus of the prestigious North South University in Dhaka, which the terror expert said they had been monitoring for some time now as some of the students had set up a Facebook group with posts that were seen as beoing pro-ISIS. The terrorists had only arrived in Dhaka a day earlier from abroad, he said.
On the charge by one of the Bangla PM's top advisers that the terrorists had been working at the behest of Pakistan's ISI which is inimical to Sheikh Hasina's government, he said. "If this is indeed true, then the link between ISIS and ISI should be investigated."
