Bangladesh. Murder number 3 this year.
A secular blogger has been hacked to death in north-east Bangladesh, the third such deadly attack this year.
Police said Ananta Bijoy Das was murdered as he headed to work at a bank in the city of Sylhet, an attack that fellow writers said highlighted a culture of impunity.
Kamrul Hasan, commissioner of Sylhet police, said a group of about four masked attackers pounced on Das with machetes at about 8.30am on Tuesday on a busy street in Bangladesh’s fifth-largest city.
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Hasan would not be drawn on the motive for the attack but fellow writers said Das had been on a hitlist drawn up by militants who were behind the recent killing of a blogger who was a US citizen.
Imran Sarker, head of a Bangladeshi bloggers’ association, said Das was an atheist who wrote blogs for Mukto-Mona, a website formerly moderated by Avijit Roy, a Bangladeshi-born US citizen who was stabbed to death in the capital, Dhaka, in February.
Debasish Debu, a friend of Das, said the 33-year-old banker was also an editor of a quarterly magazine called Jukti (Logic) and headed the Sylhet-based science and rationalist council.
Debu said Das had been receiving threats for his writing and that their frequency increased after the killing of Roy. “He had written about superstitions, but he wasn’t among the writers that would hurt the sentiments of religion,” Debu said.
According to the Mukto-Mona site, Das won the publication’s annual rationalist award in 2006 for his “deep and courageous interest in spreading secular and humanist ideals and messages”.
While most of Das’s output for Mukto-Mona focused on science and evolution, he wrote a number of blogs that criticised some aspects of Islam and also of Hinduism. He also wrote a poem eulogising the famed Bangladeshi secular writer Taslima Nasreen, who fled to Europe in 1994 after protests by Islamists.
It’s fascism.
This is a lot like the murders of women’s doctors (because they dare to provide legal abortions).
Those with power don’t like the victims, so they condone the murders by being silent.
Yes, they’re condoning it, participating in it and encouraging it. Governments inaction makes them as responsible for the murders as the killers (see also: the Indian government’s inaction on mass rape).
Neither the Bangladeshi nor foreign governments have said anything. When christians were being murdered in Egypt, the US and other western countries were up in arms. But now there’s only silence, and it speaks volumes.
Re:
‘…now there’s only silence, and it speaks volumes…’
Nothing to add. Yes, it really does.
The Christians were able to kill their enemies from 400AD when they first gained political power, until 1826 when the last European (Cayetano Ripoll) was executed by the Inquisition. I wonder how long the Muslims will be permitted to kill their enemies before the governments crack down on them..