A US national of Bangladesh origin was among the nine suspected Islamist militants killed in a gunfight with police in Dhaka, police said on Wednesday.
Dhaka Metropolitan Police spokesman Masudur Rahman said that the 24-year-old Shahzad Rouf was one of the nine young men, who were killed in the militant hide-out raid on Tuesday.
"He was an American citizen. We confirmed his identity by checking finger prints," he told AFP.
He said the investigators have also identified six other extremists by matching their finger prints with their national identity cards.
Rahman said Rouf was a business administration student at the North South University (NSU).
NSU is one of the top private universities in Bangladesh which has students mainly from the elite class of the country. But recently, it has been a hotbed of Islamist extremism.
Two the universities former students were among the five Islamist militants who killed 22 people at an upscale Dhaka cafe on July 1.
Another NSU student was shot dead in northern Bangladesh when the Islamists launched an attack on the country's largest Eid gathering.
Rouf's body was shown to his father for identification but he was not sure whether it was his son's body.
"I am not 100 percent sure," Touhid Rouf said. "I am confused. Maybe it is because the body had an autopsy and it was partly decomposed."
Touhid Rouf confirmed that his son was an American passport holder. He also added that Rouf was missing from home for the last six months.
After the July 1 attack, the Rapid Action Battalion had prepared a list of missing people who might have fled the country and joined the ISIS group. Rouf's name was included in that list.
The officers recovered ISIS black flags and robes from the hideout of those nine militants. The extremists had claimed to be members of the ISIS group.
But the national police chief has rejected their claim and said that those nine extremists were members of the banned homegrown militant group, Jamayetul Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB).
