WASHINGTON — (CNN) Police exchanged gunfire with armed attackers Friday in a diplomatic zone of Dhaka, Bangladesh.
Here’s what we know:
– There are armed assailants inside a Spanish restaurant. Some customers are trapped inside, police official Gen. Benzir Ahmed told reporters. “We are trying to resolve this issue peacefully,” he said. It’s unclear how many hostages there are.
– Assailants are throwing grenades at police, a source at the scene said.
– A police bomb disposal unit was on standby to go in.
– The U.S. Embassy in Dhaka warned of the situation on Twitter, advising people to shelter in place and noting that a hostage situation had been reported. Later, the embassy advised it had accounted for all of the American citizens working under the chief of the mission authority.
– The area has been cordoned off, police said.
The attack comes on the same day a Hindu priest was hacked to death at his temple in Bangladesh’s southwestern district of Jhenaidah early Friday, police said.
That incident was the latest in a wave of murders across Bangladesh of secular bloggers, academics and religious minorities such as Hindus, Christians, Buddhists and Sufi Muslims — despite a nationwide government crackdown and the arrest of more than 14,000 people.
The government launched an anti-militant drive across the Muslim-majority nation last month to stamp out the murders, but many of those detained are believed to be ordinary criminals and not Islamic extremists.
Home to almost 150 million Muslims, the country until recently had avoided the kind of radicalism plaguing others parts of the world. But that’s changing as the attacks seem designed to silence those to dare to criticize Islam.
One high-profile killing was the murder of Bangladeshi-American writer Avijit Roy in 2014 that occurred right outside Dhaka’s annual book fair. In April, a well-known LGBT activist and his friend were murdered.
The trend has sparked debate about the involvement of ISIS.
The group, which calls itself the Islamic State, has claimed a number of the attacks through its media affiliates, but the Bangladesh government has consistently denied any ISIS presence in the country. Other attacks have been claimed by local Islamist groups.
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