More on Ahmed Rajib and the context of his murder.
A blogger who had been critical of Bangladesh’s Islamist groups was killed in the capital late Friday, police said, a day after he attended a big rally against leaders of the country’s largest Islamic party.
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Police found the body of Ahmed Rajib, 35 — better known by his online identity Thaba Baba — near his home in Dhaka’s Pallabi suburb, with his head hacked apart with a machete.
“We recovered the machete. It is clear the attacker wanted to murder him. They did not touch his laptop or other valuable objects,” police official Sheikh Motiur Rahman told AFP.
Police have not commented on a possible motive for the killing, but Rahman, citing Rajib’s relatives, said the blogger played a large role in organising the anti-Islamist protests.
Rajib’s brother, who declined to be named, told AFP his sibling had been “threatened frequently” by Islamists angry at his role in the protests and his writings against the religion.
He isn’t the first.
The killing late Friday was the second fatal attack in Dhaka against a blogger critical of Islamist groups in less than a month, after the stabbing death of a self-styled online “militant atheist” by three unidentified men near his office in the upscale Uttara district.
Taslima doesn’t live in Bangladesh any more. Tasneem doesn’t live in Bangladesh any more.
And although I know how much pain it causes Taslima to be separated from her country of birth and childhood (sadly, I don’t know Tasneem), I am mighty glad that she doesn’t have to live in what has effectively become a cauldron of virulent, hateful Islamic fundamentalists.
Of course, to my eternal shame, my own state – from which Bangladesh was once carved out – my own state, under my so-called secular democracy of a country, has not provided her with any succor either, because politicians are beholden to our country’s own brand of Islamic fundamentalists for their vote banks.
In any part of the world, threats and acts of violence are the only refuges of fundamentalist religious scoundrels.
Kausik, get to know Tasneem. He’s worth knowing! Find him on Facebook and/or Twitter etc.
I used to link to his blog and journalism. Then one day I got an email from his wife – he’d been arrested in the middle of the night and she managed to send an email to all his friends to get the word out, so we did. The cops released him (and the two of them now live in Sweden). That was one time when internet activism seemed genuinely useful.
Situation corrected with alacrity… Following him on Twitter now!