ISIS Claims It Struck Police in Bangladesh

NEW DELHI — The Islamic State, in statements attributed to it, claimed responsibility for an attack near the Bangladeshi capital that left one police officer dead and another wounded, according to the SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors extremist activity online.

The attack took place Wednesday morning at a checkpoint along a street about 30 miles from the capital, Dhaka, in what appeared to be the first assault on representatives of the Bangladeshi state to be claimed by the Islamic State. It comes as extremist violence is rising, and as threats against vocal secularists in the country are increasing.

The Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, claimed the attack in a message circulated online, SITE said late Wednesday.

“In a security operation, Allah enabled the soldiers of the state in Bangladesh to attack a police checkpoint,” SITE quoted the group as saying, and “the soldiers of the caliphate withdrew safely.”

A police official said two men rode up on a motorcycle to the checkpoint in the Baroipara area between 7:35 and 7:45 a.m., as five officers were preparing for a new shift. They were putting on helmets and other gear and were not carrying their weapons, said Habibur Rahman, the superintendent of police in the Dhaka district.

The men stabbed two constables who were standing apart from the rest and opened fire before escaping on their motorcycle, the superintendent said.

United States officials have expressed concern over possible threats the Islamic State poses in Bangladesh, and the group, in social media messages, also appears to have claimed responsibility for a series of other attacks. Those include the killing of two foreigners this year, and the bombing of a large gathering of Shiites last month that killed a teenage boy and wounded dozens of people.

The most recent episodes, after the killings of secularist bloggers and attacks against their publishers over the past year, have contributed to an atmosphere of fear in Bangladesh. In addition to the Islamic State,a regional division of Al Qaeda has claimed responsibility for some of the attacks on bloggers and, most recently, for attacks on two publishers of works critical of fundamentalist Islam, according to SITE.

Government officials say that the Islamic State does not exist in Bangladesh, and Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina has called the attacks a conspiracy by domestic political opponents of her government.

Last week, Mr. Rahman said, the police in the Dhaka district arrested five activists belonging to Jamaat-e-Islami, an Islamist party in the country, on suspicion of planning to carry out an attack. They were found with a pistol, bullets and explosives, he said.

The investigation into the attack on Wednesday has just begun, he added, but one possible explanation is that it was revenge for those arrests.

“We never thought that police would be attacked in the daytime by criminals in the open air,” Mr. Rahman said. “This never happened before. This was a new style of crime. Now we will have to think how to deal.”