Bangladesh PM Post-Islamic State Massacre: ‘Islam Is a Religion of Peace

[link to www.breitbart.com]



Prime minister of Bangladesh Sheikh Hasina issued a statement following the murder of twenty people, mostly foreign nationals, at the hands of Islamic State-affiliated jihadis Friday insisting that “Islam is a religion of peace” and jihadists are “tarnishing” the faith.

“Islam is a religion of peace. Stop killing in the name of the religion,” Hasina said in a televised message following the culmination of a ten-hour siege of a bakery popular with foreign nationals in the nation’s capital, Dhaka. “Please stop tarnishing our noble religion … I implore you to come back to the rightful path and uphold the pride of Islam,” she asserted. Hasina announced two official days of mourning following the attack, and appeared to address not only the Dhaka siege but a string of hacking murders nationwide targeting LGBT writers, secular thinkers, and those publicly critical of Islam.

“What kind of Muslims are these people? They don’t have any religion,” she added.

Like many of the previous jihadist murders in the country, the twenty people killed in Dhaka were “brutally hacked to death with sharp weapons,” according to Brigadier General Nayeem Ashfaq Chowdhury. In addition to the hostages, two police officers lost their lives while storming the cafe and ending the siege.

Witnesses say the jihadists could have killed more people, but freed those who identified as Muslim and could prove it by reciting the Quran.

 

“They pointed a gun at my chest and asked me if I was Muslim… I begged for life… they let me run away,” a waiter identified as Ashraf in the capital’s Dhaka Tribunetold the newspaper. “The attackers waited some moments and screamed Allahu Akbar and fired blank shots indiscriminately and blasted handmade bombs,” he added.

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