The wife of a top Bangladeshi police officer who carried out several raids against militants was stabbed and shot dead today by three bike-borne assailants in front of her minor son in the port city of Chittagong, the latest attack by suspected extremists, police said.
Mahmuda Aktar, 33, was targeted by the gunmen at around 6:45 AM (local time) while she was on her way to drop her first-grader son to a nearby bus stop for school in Chittagong, about 275 kilometres from here.
She was the wife of Superintendent of Police Babul Aktar, now posted at the police headquarters in Dhaka.
Babul has led several raids on militant hideouts and investigated several terror-related cases as the additional deputy commissioner with the Detective Branch in Chittagong.
Babul, who was promoted in April, played a key role in nabbing top militants and busting their hideouts in the southern coastal district.
It was his investigations which led to the busting of a hideout of banned outfit Jama'atul Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB) and arrest of its military wing chief Mohamed Javed in October last year.
"Since Babul Aktar was in counter-terrorism, we suspect that militants are behind the murder of his wife," Detective Branch Deputy Commissioner Moktar Ahmed was quoted by bdnews24 as saying.
Quoting witnesses, Chittagong metro police's Deputy Commissioner Paritosh Ghose said that three bike-borne attackers ambushed Mahmuda in front of her six-year-old son.
The boy said that the attackers first took him away and then one of them stabbed his mother with a knife before shooting her.
Police said that Mahmuda was shot in the head.
"We found three live ammunition and a used casing on the spot. The bullet hit her on the left side of the head," said Police Bureau of Investigation's Additional Superintendent Bashir Ahmed. She is survived by a four-year-old daughter.
There have been systematic assaults in Bangladesh in recent months specially targeting minorities, secular bloggers, intellectuals and foreigners.
In the recent attacks, a liberal professor was brutally hacked to death in April by machete-wielding ISIS militants who slit his throat near his home in Rajshahi city.
