Faisal Arefin Dipan was one of Roy’s local publishers.
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“I rushed to his office at Aziz Market and broke the padlock”. When Dipan’s father found him, his throat was slashed, and he was lying upside-down in a pool of blood, Agence France-Press reports. They slaughtered his neck. Two writers were also wounded in that attack.
The three men had been hacked in Tutul’s office in capital Dhaka’s Lalmatia around 2:30pm on Saturday.
All three men, which included writers Ranadeep Basu and Tareque Rahim, were hospitalized.
Condemnations kept pouring in from the worldwide community yesterday following Saturday’s attacks on two publishers and as many writers.
One of the other victims was Sudip Kumar Barman, who blogs under the name Ranadipam Basu and has published commentaries on the website curated by Avijit Roy before his death.
The violence followed the killings of four atheist bloggers this year.
According to Pew surveys, 82 percent of Bangladeshi Muslims believe Sharia law should be written into the country’s lawbooks, although 60 percent say it should only apply to Muslims.
In response, radical Islamist groups launched a campaign to portray all of those connected with the protests as atheists and anti-Islamic. Since then three other bloggers have been killed.
A group affiliated with the al-Qaeda in Indian Subcontinent claimed responsibility for the attack. The recent attacks on a Japanese, a Christian pastor and a Shia community gathering that left two dead and 80 injured are part of a campaign of terror unleashed by extremists.
The publisher had filed a complaint with police after being threatened with death in a posting on Facebook following the attack on Roy, his friends said. “These attacks have echoes of our Liberation War when eliminating the country’s intellectuals was a very strategic war policy”. The first attack came in February, when machete-wielding attackers killed Avijit Roy in the capital city of Dhaka.
Amnesty global called on the Bangladesh government to “act urgently” to ensure the protection of others in the country, calling the attacks ” a deliberate assault against freedom of expression”.
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De Dora also took aim at Bangladesh’s Prime Minister, Sheikh Hasina, for “placing blame on the victims for offending religious feelings”. The government did not crack down on the Islamists until there was Western criticism for failing to stop the attacks.
