Dhaka: Gulshan restaurant attack suspect Tahmid Hasib Khan, also a student of Toronto University of Canada, has been ordered to be held in custody.

Dhaka Metropolitan Magistrate Delwar Hossain made the order on Saturday after Dhaka Metropolitan Police’s Counter Terrorism and Transnational Crime unit Inspector Humayan Kabir placed Tahmid, a Bangladeshi born Canadian, before the court following his stay in police custody for interrogation for six days.

Earlier, the police officer filed a petition with the court seeking permission for holding Tahmid (22) in judicial custody mentioning that police had found a huge amount of information from him during the interrogation and if the court granted bail to him, the investigation might have been hampered.

The court also rejected the bail petition filed by Tahmid’s lawyer.

On 13 August, the court of Dhaka Metropolitan Magistrate Golam Nabi sent Tahmid to police custody for six days in with a Gulshan restaurant attack case after he was placed before the court following an eight-day interrogation.

A team of the CTTC arrested former North South University teacher Abul Hasnat Rezaul Karim (47), who is now in police custody for eight days, and Tahmid on 3 August from the city’s Gulshan and Bashundhara areas respectively for their suspected link to the attack that killed 22 people last month. The attack was claimed by Islamic State.

They were shown arrested under Section 54 of the Code of Criminal Procedure (CrPC). British national Abul Hasnat and Candian national Tahmid Hasib Khan were rescued along with 11 others during the commando operation at the Holey Artisan Bakery at the city’s diplomatic zone Gulshan on 2 July following a 12-hour hostage standoff.

Neither Karim nor Khan has been seen in public since the end of the siege when commandos stormed the cafe in the capital’s upmarket Gulshan neighbourhood on the morning of July 2.

Their family claimed that they had remained traceless since then. However, law enforcement agencies said that they set them free after interrogation over the restaurant attack.

The men’s families have said they were being held by security forces even though there was no evidence to link them to the attackers.

Relatives say Karim, his wife and two children were at the cafe to celebrate the 13th birthday of their daughter.

Law enforcers said both the men were being investigated for suspicious activity during the siege. They said Tahmid Hasib Khan was seen holding a firearm and Hasnat Karim strolling with the attackers on the roof of the restaurant.

Hasnat Karim was a lecturer at the North-South University in Dhaka, where two of the five attackers who were gunned down at the end of the siege had studied.

Thamid Khan, who is also a Bangladeshi citizen, was back in his homeland while on leave from the Canadian university.

Police earlier this week named a Canadian citizen, Tamim Chowdhury, as the attack’s mastermind, offering a reward of up to $25,000 for information leading to his arrest.

The siege was by far the deadliest in a string of attacks claimed by Islamist groups which have blighted Bangladesh over the last three years.