{Bombs hurled and gunfire exchanged at gathering of 200,000 people in the northern Kishoreganj district.}<\/p>\n
At least two policeman have been killed and five others wounded after a small bomb blew up near a mass Eid prayer congregation in northern Bangladesh, officials said.<\/p>\n
At least 200,000 people were gathered near a school in the northern Kishoreganj district when the bomb exploded on the premises of the school on Thursday, according to police and local media.<\/p>\n
There were reports of exchanges of gunfire at the scene.<\/p>\n
The private Somoy TV station broadcast footage of a gunfight between police and a group of attackers and reported the policeman had been hacked to death.<\/p>\n
“They threw a bomb at a police checkpost. A police constable was killed in the explosion. One attacker was killed and another was arrested,” Mahbubur Rahman, a police officer in the district control room, told the AFP news agency.<\/p>\n
“The congregation was not affected by the clashes,” Azimuddin Biswas, the district administrator, told AFP.<\/p>\n
There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack.<\/p>\n
Al Jazeera’s Maher Sattar, reporting from the capital Dhaka, said large gatherings for the Eid prayers were usually organised with donations from organisations and wealthy business people.<\/p>\n
“They usually have very good security because they are such large gatherings,” he said. “They are one of the best protected events in the country.” <\/p>\n
The incident comes days after 20 hostages were killed – many of them hacked to death – during a 12-hour siege at a popular restaurant in an upscale suburb of Dhaka. <\/p>\n
It was one of the deadliest attacks ever in Bangladesh, where al-Qaeda and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant group have made competing claims for a series of killings in the past year.<\/p>\n
The government has dismissed those statements and insists the violence is homegrown.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
{Bombs hurled and gunfire exchanged at gathering of 200,000 people in the northern Kishoreganj district.} At least two policeman have been killed and five others wounded after a small bomb blew up near a mass Eid prayer congregation in northern Bangladesh, officials said. At least 200,000 people were gathered near a school in the northern […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[101],"byline":[2474],"hashtag":[],"class_list":["post-26684","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-internationl","byline-al-jazeera"],"bylines":[{"id":2474,"name":"AL JAZEERA","slug":"al-jazeera","description":"","image":{"id":0,"url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/?s=96&d=mm&f=y&r=g","alt":"Default avatar","title":"Default avatar","caption":"","mime_type":"image\/jpeg","sizes":[]},"user_id":null}],"contributors":[{"id":2474,"name":"AL JAZEERA","slug":"al-jazeera","description":"","image":{"id":0,"url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/?s=96&d=mm&f=y&r=g","alt":"Default avatar","title":"Default avatar","caption":"","mime_type":"image\/jpeg","sizes":[]},"user_id":null}],"featured_image":null,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26684","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26684"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26684\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26684"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26684"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26684"},{"taxonomy":"byline","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/byline?post=26684"},{"taxonomy":"hashtag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/hashtag?post=26684"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}