DHAKA Two police officers were injured in a raid on a house in the Chittagong district of Bangladesh, where three people identified as militants were arrested on Wednesday, police said.
The suspected militants threw grenades at police after they surrounded the house and demanded that the occupants surrender, a senior police officer said.
The three arrested included a woman with a child, who was wearing a suicide bomb on her belt, said Iftekhar Uddin, the officer in charge of the police station in Sitakunda, the area of Chittagong where the raid took place.
“The bomb squad of the Chittagong Metropolitan Police deactivated the bomb and arrested all militants, including the female militant,” Uddin said.
The militants rented the house in Sitakunda, about 264 kilometers (165 miles) south-east of Dhaka, earlier this month, police said. Using fake IDs, they introduced themselves to the house’s owner as a family. He became suspicious and called police.
Forty-eight people have been killed or seriously wounded by Islamist militants in Bangladesh since 2013. They included at least six online critics of religious militancy who were hacked to death. Among them was a U.S. citizen of Bangladeshi origin.
On July 1, 2016, at least six militants stormed a restaurant in Dhaka’s diplomatic zone and killed 20 hostages, mostly foreigners, and two police officers. All the militants were killed as Bangladesh commandoes ended the 12-hour long siege.
(Reporting By Serajul Quadir,; additional reporting by Nazimuddin Shyamol from Chittagong, editing by Larry King)
