Extremists kill blogger in Bangladesh

A Bangladeshi blogger who criticised Islamist extremism was hacked to death on Monday by attackers, said by police to be religious students, became the second secular blogger to die in such an assault in the capital Dhaka this year.

Washikur Rahman's death on a busy street reinforced fears about the rise of violent Islamist extremist groups outside the political mainstream, amid popular weariness with feuding between the country's main parties - the governing Awami League and the opposition Bangladesh Nationalist party.

"He wrote content, mainly in Facebook, that was critical of radical Islam and for the rights of minorities," Imran Sarker, a secular leader and campaigner, said of Mr Rahman, adding that the killers were from madrasas (Islamic schools) in Chittagong and Dhaka and loyal to the fundamentalist Hefazat Islam organisation.

Last month, Avijit Roy, a prominent Bangladeshi-American blogger, was killed in the same way in Dhaka after returning to Bangladesh to launch a book.

His wife Rafida Ahmed was seriously injured in the machete attack, which happened as they returned from a book fair in the university district. An Islamist group calling itself Ansar Bangla 7 appeared to take responsibility for that killing, with its Twitter feed declaring: "The target was an American citizen."

Mr Rahman's Facebook page shows a banner at the top bearing the phrases #IAmAvijit and #WordsCannotBeKilled. It also includes critical notes entitled "jaw-crushing answers to insulting comments of atheists" about some of his writings.

Police said they had caught two of the three attackers with cleavers as they left the scene of the murder.

Bangladeshi politics has been in turmoil this year, following Sheikh Hasina's re-election as prime minister last year at the head of an Awami League government. The opposition BNP boycotted the election as unfair, and its leader Khaleda Zia accused Ms Hasina of killing democracy and establishing a one-party state.

Since the first anniversary of the poll in January, the BNP has tried to impose almost constant transport blockades and strikes across the country, leaving 100 dead in the firebombings of buses and other incidents and most children deprived of school for three months.

The government has meanwhile arrested thousands of its opponents, including BNP leaders, and at least one of them has disappeared after being taken from his home by uniformed men. Economists and business leaders say the crucial garment export trade has been disrupted, restricting the previously buoyant growth of the industry.

Hefazat Islam, a network of radical madrasas, sprang to prominence in 2013. Its supporters were protesting against secular demonstrators who wanted elderly Islamists of Jamaat Islami, a group allied to the BNP, to be hanged for crimes committed in the country's bloody civil war.

Hefazat branded the secularists as atheists and called for capital punishment for blasphemy, as well as a ban on men and women mingling in public. The clash of the two protest movements - one secular Bengali, the other Islamic nationalist - has its origins in the schism in Bangladeshi society at the time of country's violent split from Pakistan in 1971.

"These [Islamist] groups are becoming more powerful and are patronised by the powerful," said Mr Sarker, the secular leader. "They are funded by the same people who fund the Taliban - all the establishment negotiate with them and they become more powerful day by day.

"If you go through my Facebook page I receive thousands of threats - whenever they kill someone they come to me and say 'You will be next', because I am a voice against this impunity and radicalism."

© The Financial Times Limited 2015. All rights reserved.
FT and Financial Times are trademarks of the Financial Times Ltd.
Not to be redistributed, copied or modified in any way.
Euro2day.gr is solely responsible for providing this translation and the Financial Times Limited does not accept any liability for the accuracy or quality of the translation