Dhaka, May 12 (Reuters): A blogger was hacked to death by machete-wielding attackers in Bangladesh today, the third killing of an online critic of religious extremism in less than three months.
Ananta Bijoy Das died instantly after a gang of masked men attacked him with machetes near his house at Subidbazar area in Sylhet this morning as he was on his way to office, police said.
"Four armed assailants attacked him when he was going to the town in a rickshaw," airport police station officer in charge Gausul Hossain said.
"They (killers) attacked him from behind... he was hit with machetes on the head and died instantly," an eyewitness said.
Das, 33, who worked as a banker, was the editor of the science magazine, Jukti (Logic), and was on the advisory board of Mukto Mona (Free Mind), a website propagating rationalism and opposing fundamentalism. Mukto Mona was founded by US-based blogger Avijit Roy.
Roy himself was hacked to death in February while returning home with his wife from a Dhaka book fair.
Roy's widow, Rafida Bonya Ahmed, who was maimed in the attack and is in hiding in the US, told Reuters that Das's case was similar to that of her husband. "We told him so many times you need to be careful, but he just thought that this was his passion, what he was supposed to do, and he had been doing it for a long time," she said.
She said Das had been a regional leader of an effort to bring alleged Muslim war criminals from the 1971 revolution to justice, a politically divisive issue. Ahmed said she would not be surprised if more bloggers were targeted. "Because the killers know they can get away with this, it will continue to happen," she said."This is serial killing."
According to monitoring service SITE Intelligence Group, Islamist militant group Ansar al-Islam Bangladesh said al Qaida in the Indian Subcontinent (AQIS) had claimed responsibility for the attack.
Imran Sarker, head of a network of activists and bloggers in Bangladesh, said if the government did not end "this culture of impunity ... the fundamentalists will turn our secular country into another Pakistan or Afghanistan."
Two years ago, Das wrote a poem eulogising self-exiled Bangladeshi poet and writer Taslima Nasreen. She shared the poem on her Facebook page, Suprity Dhar, a common friend of Das and Nasreen, said.
Shahiduzzaman Paplu, a close friend of the slain blogger, said Das was known for his writing on "materialism and logic" in blogs. He had also written the preface of a book authored by Avijit Roy.
Das updated his Facebook status last night, questioning the police's role in the killing of Roy and blogger Washiqur Rahman.
His last post, minutes before his murder, was on a ruling party MP's boast that he wanted to whip a university teacher.
More than 120 people have died in violent anti-government protests this year and thousands of opposition activists have been arrested.
Militants have targeted secularist writers in Bangladesh in recent years, while the government has tried to crack down on hardline Islamist groups seeking to make the South Asian nation a sharia-based state. On March 30, Washiqur Rahman, another secular blogger who aired his outrage over Roy's death on social media, was killed in similar fashion in Dhaka.
