DHAKA, Bangladesh — A blogger who wrote for a website that promoted secularism was killed Tuesday by a group of men wielding sharp weapons, a police official said. It was the third fatal attack on a Bangladeshi blogger since February.
Four men chased the blogger, Ananta Bijoy Das, through streets near his home in the northeastern city of Sylhet and attacked him, said Mohammad Rahamat Ullah, a police official in Sylhet. No arrests have been made, Ullah said.
The assailants walked away after the attack, leaving Das’s body near a pond, Ullah said.
Imran Sarker, the head of an organization of secular bloggers in Bangladesh, said Das had written for Free Mind, a website that the Bangladeshi-American blogger Avijit Roy had moderated before being killed in February by machete-wielding assailants while leaving a book fair in Dhaka, the capital.
Five weeks after Roy’s death, another blogger, Oyasiqur Rhaman, was killed by three men with machetes in Dhaka. The deaths recalled the 2013 killing in Dhaka of the blogger Ahmed Rajib Haider.
Haider, Roy, and Rhaman were all part of a movement known as Shahbag, which called for the death penalty for Islamist political leaders who were implicated in atrocities committed during Bangladesh’s 1971 war for independence from Pakistan. Young Islamic activists reacted with fury to the Shahbag movement, dividing young people on the question of whether Bangladesh should be a secular or Islamic state.
Sarker said Das was also an activist with the Shahbag movement, organizing street protests in Sylhet. According to Free Mind, Das had also edited a magazine called Logic several years ago that published essays on secular humanism.
The leader of the Indian branch of Al Qaeda claimed responsibility for the deaths of Roy and Haider in a video posted on jihadi forums on May 2. The video was translated by the SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors extremist activity online.