Nine militants, who were killed in a police raid in their Kalyanpur hideout two months ago, were buried in the city's Jurain graveyard yesterday.
Anjuman Mufidul Islam, a voluntary organisation, collected the bodies from the mortuary at Dhaka Medical College (DMC) in the morning and buried them in the afternoon.
The bodies were buried by the organisation as no one from the militants' families contacted law enforcers to receive them, Masudur Rahman, deputy commissioner (media) of Dhaka Metropolitan Police, told The Daily Star.
All but one of the bodies were identified after matching their DNA profiles with those of their family members.
The eight militants are Abdullah from Dinajpur, Abu Hakim Nayeem from Patuakhali, Taj-ul-Haque Rashiq from the capital's Dhanmondi, Akifuzzaman Khan from Gulshan, Shazad Rouf Orko from Bashundhara, Motiar Rahman from Satkhira, Jubayer Hossain from Noakhali and Raihan Kabir Tarek from Rangpur.
On July 26, police raided the Jahaj Building in the city's Kalyanpur and shot dead the nine militants. They also arrested a militant while another managed to flee.
Earlier, the bodies of five Gulshan café attackers and a chef were buried at the same graveyard on September 22. The bodies had been kept in the mortuary of Combined Military Hospital.
The six were killed during a commando operation at the café on July 2, a day after a hostage-taking at the eatery that left 22 people, including 17 foreigners, killed.
Representatives from the DMP's Counter Terrorism Unit and the voluntary organisation reached the DMC mortuary around 10:30am yesterday. After completion of all the necessary formalities in one and a half hours, the bodies were taken to the graveyard.
Hafez Maulana Shoaib Hossain, in-charge of the graveyard, said the burials were completed around 1:45pm after holding a namaz-e-janaza there.
Sohel Mahmud, head of the forensic medicine department at the DMC, said they collected samples from the nine bodies for conducting any further tests in future, if needed.
The burials brought respite to the DMC authorities as the nine bodies occupied a major part of the mortuary for around two months, hampering its normal operations.
This newspaper contacted four of the nine militants' families. Three of them had said they would not receive the bodies as their relatives were involved in militancy. However, the other family said it had applied to police to hand over the body, but to no avail.
Abdul Kaiyum, father of Jubayer, told our Noakhali correspondent that his family did not apply for the body as Jubayer was involved in anti-Islamic and terrorist activities.
Talking to our Dinajpur correspondent, Abudllah's father Sohrab Ali said he decided not to apply for his son's body as he was a militant.
Raihan's father Shahjahan Kabir also made the same decision.
Anusha Rouf, sister of Shazad, told this correspondent yesterday that they wrote to the authorities concerned over two weeks ago for handing Shazad's body over to them.
“As Shazad was a US citizen, we with the help of the US embassy in Dhaka tried to get the body. But the authorities did not give the body to us,” she added.
The bodies of five __more militants, including “Neo JMB” coordinator Tamim Ahmed Chowdhury, were still in the DMC morgue. The five were killed in Narayanganj and in the capital's Rupnagar and Azimpur areas during operations by law enforcers.
A top DMP official said they were yet to decide on handing over the bodies to the respective families.