No free speech in Muslim Bangladesh

A MASKED gang wielding machetes hacked a blogger to death in Bangladesh on Tuesday — the third deadly attack since February.
Ananta Bijoy Das was murdered in broad daylight as he headed to work at a local bank in the city of Sylhet, police said.

A group of four masked men attacked him with machetes around 8:30am on a busy street in the country’s fifth biggest city, before melting back into the crowd.

Police would not comment on a motive for the brutal attack. However fellow writers say he was on a ‘hit list’ drawn up by militants behind a spate of killings including fellow blogger Avijit Roy — a Bangladeshi-born US citizen who was hacked to death in the capital Dhaka in February.

Head of a Bangladeshi bloggers’ association, Imran Sarker said Das was an atheist who regularly blogged for Mukto-Mona, a website that used to be run by Roy.

“We condemn this heinous killing. It once again confirms our fear that there is a culture of impunity in Bangladesh. Anyone can now get away with killing a progressive free thinker,” Mr Sarker said.

Police chief Hasan said they are investigating an announcement by an unknown group called Ansar Al-Islam who said on Twitter that al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent was responsible for Das’s murder and warned of more to come.

The group has already claimed responsibility for the deadly attack on Roy on February 26 in which his wife was badly injured. An Islamic extremist has been arrested over his murder.

Debasish Debu, a friend of recently killed blogger Das, said the 33-year-old banker was an editor of a quarterly magazine called Jukti (Logic) and headed the Sylhet-based Science and Rationalist Council.

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”.

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