Spokesmen for the Rapid Action Battalion (RAB), the country’s elite security force, told Agence France-Presse that they had arrested 58-year-old Touhidur Rahman and two other “active members” of recently banned organization Ansarullah Bangla Team. “He is the main planner of the attacks on Avijit Roy and Ananta Bijoy Das”, Alam reportedly said.
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In March, another blogger, Washiqur Rahman, was hacked to death in Dhaka.
Das was killed after masked gang wielding machetes hacked the secular blogger to death in north-eastern Bangladesh in May.
A British citizen is one of three people arrested on suspicion of killing bloggers in Bangladesh, with police describing him as “the main planner”. Rahmani is in jail awaiting trial in the murder of another blogger, Ahmed Rajib Haider, in Dhaka in 2013.
The alleged link to the United Kingdom is not surprising, Singh added, pointing out that British citizens have been found to be involved with Islamic fundamentalism in the past.
A British citizen along with two others has been arrested for their involvement in the murder of Avijit Roy and Anant Bijoy Das.
Two other bloggers have been killed in Bangladesh this year, though the three suspects have not been arrested for those killings.
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Most secular bloggers have gone into hiding, often using pseudonyms in their posts. It’s said to be linked to al Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent, or AQIS, a branch of the Islamist extremist group that formed in recent years, he said. In May, authors including Salman Rushdie and Margaret Atwood used a petition to urge the government of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, “to do all in their power to ensure that the tragic events… are not repeated”.
