Fourth secular blogger murdered in Bangladesh: Activist group

A Bangladeshi secular blogger has been killed by unknown assailants in capital city Dhaka on Friday, media reported.

He is the fourth Bangladeshi blogger killed this year by suspected militants.

Imran H Sarkar further added the attackers entered Mr Neel’s room, “shoved his friend aside and then hacked him to death”.

Niloy Chakrabarti, 40, was known as Niloy Neel on Facebook. His wife was reportedly in the apartment but was confined in another room by the attackers.

The incident took place barely two months into the brutal killing of blogger and online activist Ananta Bijoy Das, which itself followed the killing of Oyasiqur Rahman Babu.

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.

All four bloggers killed were involved with the Ganajagaran Mancha.

“We are gravely concerned by this escalating pattern of violence against writers and journalists who are peacefully expressing their views”, said the petition.

“We primarily came to know that the victim was a blogger”, the police official said. “While Avijit and I were being ruthlessly attacked, the local police stood close by and did not act”, Rafida told Reuters.

“Who will be next for demanding justice for Niloy?”

Tragically, these three deaths are not an aberration.

More than a dozen people have been sentenced to death since 2010 for mass killings, abduction, rape and torture during Bangladesh’s struggle for freedom from Pakistan in 1971. Ahmed Rajib Haider, an atheist blogger was hacked to death on February 2013, by machete-wielding activists from a militant group associated with the Jamaat-e-Islami party.