Portrait of blood: Dhaka victims and the fate that brought them together

<span style="font-size: 15.6px; line-height: 22px;">The deaths in the militant attack on a restaurant in Bangladesh were at once random, and not so random.

<span style="font-size: 15.6px; line-height: 22px;">They were Italian business people in textiles, a major industry in a country that is a center for low-cost production. They were two students from an American university who had ties to Bangladesh.

<span style="font-size: 15.6px; line-height: 22px;">Their lives intersected on a Friday night at the western-style restaurant at Holey Artisan Bakery, a popular hangout for the relatively well-heeled in the Gulshan diplomatic enclave in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh. By Saturday morning, after security forces stormed the restaurant to end a 10-hour siege, they were dead. The Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attack, saying it had targeted citizens of what it called ‘Crusader countries’. Their stories paint a portrait of innocent lives lost in the world’s latest militant attack.

<span style="font-size: 15.6px; line-height: 22px;">Dhaka, a city of 7 million, has some serious traffic congestion, so it’s no surprise that transport is a key area of Japanese government aid in Bangladesh.

<span style="font-size: 15.6px; line-height: 22px;">The work brought together eight technical experts, from three Tokyo-based consulting firms, who were eating together when the attack began at 9:20 pm. Two women and five men died. Only one made it out alive.

<span style="font-size: 15.6px; line-height: 22px;">Tomaoki Watanabe, who was hospitalised after being shot, was one of four employees from ALMEC Corp., a transportation consultancy with offices in Manila, Hanoi, Jakarta and Ulan Bator, according to its website. The other three – Yuko Sakai, Rui Shimodaira and Makoto Okamura – died.

<span style="font-size: 15.6px; line-height: 22px;">Okamura’s father, Komakichi Okamura, told Japanese media outside his home on Sunday that his 32-year-old son’s death “is unbearable as a parent”. He recalled their last words: “He said, ‘I am leaving now’… and I said to him to be careful. That was the last conversation I had with him on the telephone.”

<span style="font-size: 15.6px; line-height: 22px;">Another victim, Koyo Ogasawara, worked for Katahira & Engineers International, a transportation consultancy that has worked on projects in Southeast Asia, Africa and Latin America.

<span style="font-size: 15.6px; line-height: 22px;">The other three were working for Oriental Consultants Global, which is part of a Japanese project to build three bridges for the widening of the national highway from Dhaka to Chittagong. Two of them have been identified as Nobuhiro Kurosaki and Hiroshi Tanaka.

<span style="font-size: 15.6px; line-height: 22px;">“We feel very indignant toward the perpetrators, because these people were working hard for the development of Bangladesh,” said Shinichi Kitaoka, the president of the Japan International Cooperation Agency. He pledged to strengthen security precautions while continuing to contribute to the country’s development.