Born to a Hindu family in Bangladesh, Ozaki studied in Japan, where he acquired several degrees, converted from Hinduism to Islam, and eventually married and became a naturalised Japanese citizen.
He is alleged to have been responsible for promoting the Islamic State on Facebook and recruiting Bangladeshis to travel to Syria to support it, as well as plotting a terrorist attack in Dhaka.
[2] In 2001, he passed his higher secondary exams at Sylhet Cadet College, travelling to Japan the next year to study at Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University with a Japanese government scholarship, where he earned a bachelor's degree in business administration.
[3] He began teaching at Kyoto's Ritsumeikan University in 2011,[6] becoming an associate professor of business administration at the College of International Relations in April 2015.
[7] His family noticed him behaving unusually as early as 2008, when he returned to Bangladesh to attend his sister's wedding, attempting to hide the beard that he had grown with a surgical mask.
[2][4] In 2014, he met Gazi Sohan, a member of the extremist Neo JMB organisation (a breakaway faction of Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh that pledged its support to ISIL in 2014[8]) on an Islam-related Facebook group for graduates of Bangladeshi military academies.
[6] Ozaki had begun attempting to organise an online jihadi cell at some point in early 2014 in anticipation of the declaration of a global caliphate, which would be done later that year by ISIL, in the form of the Islamic State.
[4] In an interview published by the Islamic State's magazine Dabiq in April 2016, Ozaki, identified only by his kunya, claimed that the organisation was recruiting growing numbers of Bangladeshis, and described the region of Bengal as important to the caliphate and of potential use to further its jihad into India and Myanmar.
He further called for the "[targeting] in mass numbers" of Bangladesh's Hindu minority, accusing them of wielding important power in the country, specifically alleging that they were "cow worshippers" who created "anti-Islamic propaganda".
[7] In March 2019, Ozaki was one of ten Bangladeshi militants to surrender to the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces in Baghouz, Syria after the former Islamic State stronghold fell.
[5] This announcement came the same month as an article by The Daily Star that identified Chowdhury, who died after jumping off a five-storey building during a raid by the Rapid Action Battalion, as al-Hanif.