Dhaka: In third such incident in less than three months, another secular blogger was hacked to death in Bangladeshi city of Sylhet on Tuesday morning.
32-year-old Ananta Bijoy Das was an atheist writer who blogged for the Mukto-Mona, which was moderated by Avijit Roy who was himself killed by gangsters in February.
On Tuesday morning, while he was on his way to a bank, he was attacked by a gang of four masked machete wielding men, who hacked him to death, the CNN quoted Sylhet Metropolitan Police Commissioner Kamrul Ahsan.
The responsibility for the killing of Ananta Bijoy Das has been claimed by al Qaeda in Indian subcontinent (AQIS), tweeted Ansar Al-Islam Bangladesh. AQIS is the same terror outfit that claimed the killing of Avijit Roy in February.
#alQaeda Indian Sub-Continent (#AQIS) is taking responsibility of killing #AnantaBijoy. >>> http://t.co/rVeysWhAJ9 pic.twitter.com/acDW92Lvb4
— Ansar Al-Islam (@Ansar_BD) May 12, 2015
Reacting to Das's killing, Indian writer Madhu Kishwar has questioned the motive of his killing and asked if the secular blogger was killed because of being an atheist or because he was a Hindu.
Third atheist blogger killed in Bangladesh knife attack http://t.co/s93WZ3RYRa Was Ananta killed because he was atheist or coz he was Hindu?
— Madhu Kishwar (@madhukishwar) May 12, 2015
Earlier, Avijit Roy, a Bangladeshi-born US citizen, who also raised pitch against religious intolerance in Bangladesh, had suffered the same fate as he was killed by machete-wielding men as he was returning with his wife from a book fair.
His widow Rafida Ahmed, who herself lost a thumb in the attack, in an interview to the Reuters blamed the Dhaka government for not responding aggressively to her husband’s murder.
In March, another blogger, Washiqur Rahman, was murdered in Dhaka after which the police two madrassa students.
