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After the near-decapitated body of a 68-year-old Hindu priest was found in western Bangladesh on Tuesday, the local ISIL affiliate claimed responsibility in a communiqué that vowed to “cleanse” the country of “filth.”

It was the latest in a wave of sectarian killings in Bangladesh — many of them attributed to a regional franchise of ISIL that is reportedly led by a Canadian and former southwestern Ontario resident named Tamim Chowdhury.

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“He is from Windsor,” said Prof. Amarnath Amarasingam, a post-doctoral fellow at Dalhousie University’s Resilience Research Centre. “People who knew him say he was a quiet guy. Not much else is known about him at the moment.”

According to a report in the Bangladesh newspaper The Daily Star, Chowdhury now uses the alias Shaykh Abu Ibrahim Al-Hanif, who was identified in the latest edition of the ISIL propaganda magazine Dabiq as the “emir” of its branch in Bangladesh.