Brutality beyond description

The way the 20 Gulshan café hostages were killed was extremely brutal and the terrorists were particularly vicious when they killed the 10 women during the siege, said doctors who conducted autopsies. 

The bodies of the women bore more stab wounds than those of the men, said Sohel Mahmud, assistant professor of forensic medicine at Dhaka Medical College (DMC).

“There were 30 stab marks in the abdomen and chest of one woman, alongside the injuries to her head,” said the doctor, who led a four-member team that performed the autopsies of the victims as well as the attackers at the Combined Military Hospital (CMH).

“The autopsies suggest the victims were killed before zero hour and the militants six to seven hours later … We may submit the autopsy reports next week,” he added.

In addition to the 20 hostages -- nine Italian, seven Japanese, two Bangladeshis, one Indian and one Bangladesh-born US citizen -- the attackers bombed and killed two police officers who tried to end the siege soon after it began around 8:40pm on July 1.

The 11-hour hostage situation ended when army commandos stormed the café in the high-security diplomatic zone around 8:00am on July 2. In the operation, codenamed Thunderbolt, five militants and a chef of the café were killed.

Law enforcers said the chef was a suspect, because he “helped” the terrorists. His family denies this.

Another café employee, detained by cops as a suspect, died of injuries in a hospital.    

It was the deadliest terrorist attack and the first hostage situation in the country. Terror group Islamic State took credit for the attack, but the government denies it, saying homegrown JMB was to blame. 

The attack came after three years of targeted killings of writers, bloggers, publishers, university teachers, secular and LGBT activists and members of minority communities, including Hindus, Christians, Buddhists and Shias.

IS and Ansar Al Islam, which claims to be the local chapter of the al-Qaeda in Indian Subcontinent (AQIS), claimed credit for many of the past attacks, in which about 50 people were mostly hacked to death. But the government consistently dismissed the claims and blamed opposition parties such as BNP and Jamaat as well as homegrown militants.

Talking to The Daily Star, doctors said they collected samples necessary to determine if the women were raped before being murdered.

AUTOPSY FINDINGS

According to the doctor, 18 of the 20 victims were stabbed to death.

Two others -- a Bangladeshi and a Japanese -- were killed with blows to their heads with heavy objects.

Seven victims had eight bullets in their bodies, Sohel said, adding that the terrorists stabbed some of the bullet-hit persons indiscriminately to confirm their deaths. 

The investigators of the Counter Terrorism unit of Dhaka Metropolitan Police wrote to the DMC authorities to collect various samples from the bodies of the attackers to see if they were on drugs.

The bodies of the six are still at the CMH.

And those of the 20 hostages were handed over to their families and representatives.