Wife of Bangladeshi anti-terrorism policeman stabbed, shot dead

Three assailants riding a motorcycle stabbed and then shot Mahmuda Aktar, 33, while she was on her way to put her son onto a school bus near her home in the southeastern port city of Chittagong, police said.

BRIEFCASE

• 1

  Wife of a cop known for battling Islamist extremism shot dead.
• 2

  Assailants riding bike stabbed and then shot Mahmuda Aktar.
• 3

  Government launches security crackdown on militant groups.

The wife of a senior Bangladeshi police official known for battling Islamist militants was stabbed and shot to death today, and machete-wielding assailants killed a Christian grocer in a separate incident.

Both attacks appeared to be the work of Islamist militants who have killed at least 30 people, including religious minorities, liberal bloggers and academics, since February last year, police said.

DETAILS OF THE CASE:

Three assailants riding a motorcycle stabbed and then shot Mahmuda Aktar, 33, while she was on her way to put her son onto a school bus near her home in the southeastern port city of Chittagong, police said.

"She was stabbed first. Then they shot her in the head three times," Humayan Kabir, deputy police commissioner of Chittagong, told Reuters.

Her husband, police superintendent Babul Aktar, has played an important role in cracking down on militants in the region.

"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.

Aktar, who was recently posted to police headquarters in the capital, Dhaka, busted several hideouts of the banned group Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen. His team also arrested one of the group's leaders, who was later killed in a grenade blast during a police raid in October.

GOVERNMENT LAUNCHES CRACKDOWN ON MILITANT GROUPS

The government has launched a crackdown on militant groups who want to impose strict Islamic law on Bangladesh, whose population of 160 million are mostly moderate Muslims.

In Sunday's other killing, Sunil Gomes, a 60-year-old shopkeeper, was hacked to death in his shop in the northern district of Natore, local police official Manirul Islam said.

Islamic State claimed responsibility for killing Gomes, according to the U.S.-based monitoring service SITE.

Islamic State and al Qaeda have claimed responsibility for many killings in the past but the government denies either group has a presence in Bangladesh and says home-grown radicals are responsible.

State Minister for Foreign Affairs Shahriar Alam told Reuters in an interview last month that Islamic State was trying to ride a wave of religious radicalisation by falsely claiming killings, and said there was enough evidence implicating domestic militant groups.

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Housefull 3 Movie Review Rating 2016

  

• Genre:
  Comedy
• Cast:
  Akshay Kumar, Abhishek Bachchan, Riteish Deshmukh, Jacqueline Fernandez, Nargis Fakhri, Lisa Haydon, Jackie Shroff, Chunky Pandey
• Director:
  Sajid-Farhad

SPOILERS AHEAD

Like its central premise - three desperate drifters out to marry a trio of wealthy sisters weave their way in and out of trouble - Housefull 3 is painfully hackneyed and sickeningly silly.

But for a slapstick comedy that makes no bones about its lowbrow intentions, being trite and stupid is part of the game. It makes mass consumption easy but does nothing to serve the long-term cause of the genre.

Social intelligence and gender sensitivity are the last things one expects from a film like Housefull 3. 

Even that allowance cannot explain the sheer imbecility that is sought to be passed off here in the name of comedy. 

Directed by Farhad-Sajid, the writing duo known principally for their collaborations with Rohit Shetty, Housefull 3 is loaded with gags that militate against good taste.

Women, the physically challenged and black housemaids are sitting ducks for the writers of this film. They are constant butts of ridicule. 

Needless to say, large portions of Housefull 3 are repugnant because they brazenly mock mental and physical disabilities.

It does not take much for inspired lunacy to tip over into outright bunkum. Housefull 3 spares no effort to scrape the bottom of the barrel in search of comic energy. The result is a disaster.

Farhad-Sajid, writers of slapstick comedies and cop dramas, gave us a film titled Entertainment a couple of years ago. Out there, Entertainment was the name of a handsome golden retriever.

In Housefull 3, we are treated to a concoction gone to the dogs from the word go.

The film opens with an attempted diamond heist in central London by three men.

When the masks of the raiders come off, you expect to see the faces of the three lead actors behind them - Akshay Kumar, Riteish Deshmukh and Abhishek Bachchan.

You don't. The burglars turn out to be Nikitin Dheer, Samir Kochar and Arav Choudhary, three villains who do not get another look-in until rather late in the film. 

That's about the only real surprise that the two-and-a-quarter-hour-long Housefull 3 has in store for the audience.

Barring moments in the goofy climax staged in a wax museum warehouse strewn with models of Jackie Chan, Rajinikanth, Barack Obama, Cristiano Ronaldo et al, this film has little that could be described as genuinely amusing.

The antics and the utterances of the principal characters - and there are a whole lot of them - are meant to be funny, but they rarely are.

Housefull 3 is the kind of film that does not believe in pauses. It hurtles down a manic course that culminates in a bizarre free-for-all. 

The rigmarole begins with three sisters - Ganga (Jacqueline Fernandez), Jamuna alias Jenny (Lisa Haydon) and Saraswati alias Sarah (Nargis Fakhri) - whose shipping magnate-dad Batook Patel (Boman Irani) believes that marriage would bring ill luck to the family. 

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