In the earlier attacks on Saturday, two secular writers and another publisher of Roy were stabbed and shot in Dhaka.
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“He had no enemies”, he said, “but as killers attacked another publisher who published Avijit’s book, it is not hard to assume that they also killed my son”.
Earlier on Saturday, publisher Ahmed Rahim Tutul was attacked and seriously wounded at Shudhdhoswar publishing house.
Faisal Arefin Dipan, owner-publisher of Jagriti Publications, was hacked to death in Dhaka, Bangladesh.
The slaughtered body of Deepan, a publisher of secular books, was recovered from his office and doctors declared him dead on Saturday evening at Dhaka Medical College Hospital, said senior police official Shibly Noman.
Two businessmen who had published the works of Avijit Roy, a Bangladeshi-American known for his critical writings on religious extremism, were stabbed Saturday by groups of men in the Bangladeshi capital, Dhaka, police said. “They first started killing authors, then the bloggers and now they’ve targeted the publishers”.
The three are the latest victims in a series of attacks against the country’s secular activists, which police have blamed on the banned Islamist militant group Ansarullah Bangla Team.
Teachers, writers, students and other protesters converged on Dhaka University to vent their anger. Since the beginning of 2015, four secular bloggers have been hacked to death with machetes in their homes, at public book fairs, squares and on their morning commute to work.
Al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent (AQIS) claimed responsibility for the attacks via Twitter.
Rights group Amnesty global also asked the government “to do everything possible to find the attackers”, saying it has “reason to believe that many other lives are now at risk”. In addition, members of the Bangladesh Book Publishers and Sellers Association refrained from selling books November 2, also in protest of the attacks.
Jamaluddin Mir, a police officer, revealed that at least seven other people were trapped inside the office when the attack was carried out.
The government has accused its political opponents of orchestrating those attacks to destabilise the country, rejecting the Islamic State group s claim of responsibility.
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The bombing of the capital’s main Shiite shrine last weekend, which killed one person and wounded dozens more, has further raised concerns for minorities living in the mainly Muslim but officially secular nation.
