At least three American students have been identified among 20 people killed during an ISIS attack on a cafe in Bangladesh yesterday.
Abinta Kabir, a student at Emory University who was from Miami, Florida, died when terrorists attacked the largely foreign crowd inside the Holey Artisan Bakery in Dhaka last night.
Fellow Emory student Faraaz Hossain, who attended the college’s business school, was also identified as being among the dead by a spokesman today. Tarushi Jain, 19, who studied at University of California Berkeley campus, was also killed.
Kabir, a sophomore at Emory’s Oxford campus, was an American citizen, while Hossain was born in Bangladesh and Jain was of Indian origin.
A spokesman said: ‘Emory University has learned that two Emory students, Abinta Kabir and Faraaz Hossain, were among those taken hostage and murdered by terrorists yesterday in the attack in Dhaka, Bangladesh.
‘Abinta, who was from Miami, was a rising sophomore at Emory’s Oxford College.
‘Faraaz, who was from Dhaka, was a graduate of Oxford College and a student at the university’s Goizueta Business School.
The six attackers were killed when the army stormed the Holey Artisan Bakery to end an 11-hour siege early Saturday.
The police declined to name the young men because nobody had shown up as of Sunday night to identify their bodies, but friends and relatives recognized photographs that were posted on a messaging app by the Islamic State, along with praise for the violence.
The men, all in their late teens or early 20s, were products of Bangladesh’s elite, several having attended one of the country’s top English-medium private schools as well as universities both in the country and abroad.
Among them was the son of a former city leader in the prime minister’s own Awami League, the governing party.
The attackers intended to kill foreigners, whom they shot and then hacked with sharp weapons, blaming them for hampering the progress of Islam, one of the hostages later said.
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