20 Hostages and Six Gunmen Killed in Bangladesh Attack

Bangladeshi troops stormed an upscale restaurant in Dhaka’s diplomatic quarter on Saturday, ending an 11-hour standoff with gunmen who had hacked patrons to death and sent photos of the carnage to the Islamic State.

The authorities said 20 hostages, most of them foreigners, had been killed in the siege, the deadliest and boldest in an accelerating series of attacks by Islamist militants that have shaken the country’s secular underpinnings.

Most of the victims were “ferociously” attacked with sharp weapons, a military spokesman said. A kitchen worker who had escaped said the attackers were armed with pistols, swords and bombs.

A team of elite army commandos rescued 13 hostages and killed six attackers in the raid on Saturday morning, the military said. A seventh attacker was arrested.

The identities and nationalities of the attackers were not released.

The Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attack, in which at least 30 people were wounded, mostly from shrapnel. Two police officers were killed in the initial standoff.

“Islamic State commandos attack a restaurant frequented by foreigners in the city of Dhaka in Bangladesh,” Amaq, an information outlet linked to the Islamic State, said Friday.

Early on Saturday, the group posted photographs of what it said were the bodies of foreigners killed in the attack.

The Bangladeshi soldiers, backed by armored vehicles, swept in to the restaurant at 7:40 a.m. on Saturday.

The entire rescue operation took 12 or 13 minutes, Brig. Gen. Nayeem Ashfaque Chowdhury, the head of military operations in Bangladesh, said at a news conference. However, gunfire and explosions were heard outside the restaurant for about 40 minutes.

Dhaka, the Bangladeshi capital, was locked down on Saturday, with checkpoints every few blocks stopping cars and pedestrians.

One of the first victims to be publicly identified was Tarishi Jain, 19, of India. Sushma Swaraj, India’s minister of external affairs, said Ms. Jain was a student at the University of California, Berkeley, and a graduate of the American International School in Dhaka.

“I have spoken to her father Shri Sanjeev Jain and conveyed our deepest condolences,” Ms. Swaraj wrote on Twitter. “The country is with them in this hour of grief.”

Armed men entered the restaurant, the Holey Artisan Bakery, where about 20 foreigners were dining, around 8:45 p.m. on Friday, Sumon Reza, the kitchen worker, told reporters. The attackers shouted “God is great” before opening fire and detonating several explosives, he said.

Overnight, more than 200 people waited outside the restaurant beyond the police cordon, dozens of them relatives and friends of the hostages. Some of them communicated by text message and social media with the hostages inside.

Several kitchen employees who had locked themselves in a bathroom inside the restaurant posted a picture of themselves on Facebook, bare chested against the stifling heat.

Soumir Roy, 28, one of the employees, messaged his brother, saying, “We are here so if possible break the wall of the bathroom and rescue us.”

But after the gunfire and blasts from the rescue operations ceased, the messages from Mr. Roy stopped, and his brother and sister sat on the roadside weeping as they awaited news of whether he had survived. Ambulances were seen leaving the scene.

Nasirul Alam Porag, a co-owner of the restaurant, said about 20 staff members had been trapped in the restaurant, along with 15 to 20 patrons.

On a normal Friday evening during Ramadan the restaurant would have had 30 to 50 staff members, suggesting that many had escaped.

“Our Italian chef, he was able to escape,” Mr. Porag said by phone from Bangkok, where he runs a sister restaurant. “I had a little communication with him. He was able to go out on the roof and jumped onto the next building where he was still hiding. He’s safe now.”

At least 40 people have been killed in attacks by Islamist militants in this Muslim-majority country since 2013. The attacks, mostly carried out with machetes, first targeted atheist bloggers, then religious minorities, gay activists, foreigners and others.

The Islamic State and a local branch of Al Qaeda have claimed responsibility for many of the attacks. The Islamic State is known to have claimed responsibility for 18 of them, most perpetrated against religious minorities, including Hindus, Buddhists and Christians.

The attacks have raised fears that the once-moderate country is in the grip of a wave of violence coordinated by international terrorist groups, although the government has insisted that the attacks are committed by local groups and not coordinated by outside forces.

The government recently concluded a crackdown in which more than 10,000 people were arrested, 194 of them reportedly connected with local militant networks.

The scale and level of coordination of Friday’s attack should force the government to reconsider its position that the militancy is locally run, critics said.

“The continuous denial of the presence of local militant group connections with international terror groups has not been helpful,” said Ali Riaz, a professor of political science at Illinois State University and an expert on South Asian politics. “What we’re witnessing can’t be small groups coming together. It is clearly a very coordinated attack. If this doesn’t convince them to come out of denial, then I don’t know what will.”

As gunfire and explosions rang out across the upscale Gulshan neighborhood on Friday, witnesses posted images on Twitter of paramilitary officers surrounding the Holey Artisan Bakery, which is popular with expatriates, diplomats and middle-class families.

Mr. Reza, the kitchen worker, said he and another employee were able to escape by jumping from the building’s second floor.

“They blasted several crude bombs, causing wide-scale panic among everyone,” Mr. Reza told a Bangladeshi newspaper, The Daily Star. “I managed to flee during this confusion.”

During the standoff, police erected a cordon around the restaurant, where family members of those inside gathered to await information. Fazley Rahim Khan, a businessman, waited on the edge of the police line, barely able to see the restaurant. He said he believed that his son Tahmid Hasib Khan, 22, was being held hostage.

Mr. Khan said his son, a student in Canada, had just returned home on Friday for Ramadan. The family celebrated the iftar, the evening meal breaking the Ramadan fast, and then the son headed to the restaurant.

“I’m just praying to get back my son,” he said.

At least two Sri Lankans were among the hostages, Harikesha Wijesekera, a former president of the Sri Lanka-Bangladesh Chamber of Commerce, and his wife, Shyama, according to the group’s current president, T.D. Packir.

The Sri Lankan Foreign Ministry said later that two Sri Lankan citizens had been rescued and were unharmed.

An Indian doctor, Sat Prakash, 43, who worked at a nearby clinic had been held hostage but escaped minutes before the army stormed the restaurant, said his friend Jahirul Islam Milton.

At least one Japanese citizen was among those rescued, Japan’s deputy chief cabinet secretary, Koichi Hagiuda, said at a news conference.

Seven other Japanese believed to have been at the restaurant at the time of the attack remained unaccounted for, he said.

The Japan International Cooperation Agency said the Japanese were employees of three Tokyo-based companies that were working on a transportation-related project sponsored by the agency. The project’s goal was to relieve chronic traffic congestion in Dhaka, the agency said.

NHK, Japan’s public broadcasting network, identified the Japanese survivor as Tamaoki Watanabe. It quoted a hospital spokesman in Dhaka as saying Mr. Watanabe suffered a gunshot wound to the face and was in surgery.

Japan convened its national security council on Saturday and sent a senior Foreign Ministry official to Dhaka, Mr. Hagiuda said. “This kind of inhumane action cannot be tolerated for any reason, and as a nation we firmly condemn it,” he said.

Italy’s Foreign Ministry said that 11 Italian citizens were in the restaurant and that one escaped. It was unclear what happened to the others.

A spokeswoman for the Foreign Ministry said that there were “probable Italian victims,” but she said the ministry did not yet have official confirmation. She said the ambassador was waiting to have access to the military hospital where the victims were.

A state airplane with officials from the ministry’s crisis unit was flying to Bangladesh.