DHAKA, Bangladesh – A gang armed with machetes hacked a secular blogger
to death at his home in Dhaka today in the fourth such murder in Bangladesh
since the start of the year, an activist group and police said.
He is the fourth secular blogger to be killed in the
Muslim-majority nation since February when Bangladeshi-born US citizen Avijit
Roy, a writer and moderator of a blog site, was hacked to death in Dhaka.
Niloy Chakrabarti, who used the pen-name Niloy Neel, was
killed after the gang broke into his apartment, according to the Bangladesh
Blogger and Activist Network which was alerted to the attack by a witness.
“They entered his room in the fifth floor and shoved his
friend aside and then hacked him to death. He was a listed target of the
Islamist militants,” the network’s head Imran H. Sarker told AFP.
Police confirmed Chakrabarti had been murdered by a group of
half a dozen people in the capital’s Goran neighbourhood although they had no
details on his background
or the motive for the killing.
or the motive for the killing.
“There were six
people who knocked his door, saying that they were looking to rent a flat. Two
of them then took him to a room and then slaughtered him there,” Muntashirul
Islam, a deputy police commissioner, told AFP.
“His wife was in the flat but she was confined to another
room.”
The other victims include Ananta Bijoy Das who was attacked
by a group wielding machetes on May 13 as he headed to work in Sylhet and
27-year-old Washiqur Rahman was hacked to death in Dhaka in March.
Bangladeshi authorities banned the hardline Islamist group
Ansarullah Bangla Team (ABT) following Das’s murder in May, after facing accusations
that they were doing too little to stop such attacks.
Bangladesh is an officially secular country but more than 90
per cent of its 160 million people
are Muslim.
are Muslim.
Source: AFP
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