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Wife of Bangladeshi Anti-Terrorism Police Official Killed by Militants

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The young son of Mahmuda Aktar, the wife of a top Bangladeshi anti-terror officer, mourns after she was shot dead near her home in Chittagong on June 5, 2016. The wife of a top anti-terror officer was murdered in the southeastern city of Chittagong by suspected members of a banned local extremist group. / AFP / - (Photo credit should read -/AFP/Getty Images)
The young son of Mahmuda Aktar, the wife of a top Bangladeshi anti-terror officer, mourns after she was shot dead near her home in Chittagong on June 5, 2016.AFP/Getty Images
By Melissa Chan

Islamist militants on Sunday appeared to have killed the wife of a Bangladeshi police superintendent who has played a key role in the region’s anti-terrorism efforts.

Mahmuda Aktar, 33, was stabbed first and then shot in the head three times as she was taking her son to a school bus near her home in the southeastern port city of Chittagong, Humayan Kabir, deputy police commissioner of Chittagong, told Reuters.

She was married to police superintendent Babul Aktar, whose police work in the capital, Dhaka, has helped authorities come down on the banned group Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen, Reuters reports.

“Babul Aktar is an efficient police officer and played a key role in apprehending Islamists. They might have killed his wife because they failed to get him,” Interior Minister Asaduzzaman Khan told reporters, according to the news agency.

[Reuters]

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