Fourth secular blogger hacked to death in Bangladesh

Dhaka

A gang armed with machetes hacked a secular blogger to death at his home in Dhaka yesterday, sparking protests in the capital over the fourth such murder in Bangladesh this year.

Niloy Chakrabarti, who used the pen name Niloy Neel, was killed after the gang forced its way 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 said.

Police confirmed Chakrabarti (40) had been murdered by a group of half a dozen people at his home in the capital's Goran neighbourhood, who had pretended that they were looking for a place to rent.

"Two of them then took him to a room and then slaughtered him there," deputy police commissioner Muntashirul Islam said, adding that his wife had been "confined to another room" during the attack.

Mahbubur Rahman, another deputy commissioner, told reporters Chakrabarti's wife had been heard crying out "Save us! Save us!" but no one responded.

The Bangladesh branch of Al Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent (AQIS), Ansar al-Islam, claimed the killing and warned of more to come, according to monitoring group SITE.

"If your 'freedom of speech' maintains no limits, then widen your chests for 'freedom of our machetes'," the group, which also claimed to have murdered secular blogger Washiqur Rahman in March, said in posts on Twitter and Facebook.

Chakrabarti is the fourth secular blogger to be killed in the Muslim-majority nation since February, when Bangladeshi-born US citizen Avijit Roy was hacked to death in Dhaka. Roy's wife was also badly wounded in the attack.

Most secular bloggers have gone into hiding, often using pseudonyms in their posts. And at least seven have fled abroad, according to a Canada-based atheist blogger Farid Ahmed, who helped several of them.