Blogger Ranadipam Basu, one of the bloggers who was stabbed along with Tutul, evidently helped alert people to the attack – and his need for help – by posting a short message to Facebook minutes after the assault, reading, “They hacked us – Tutul, Tareq and me”, according to The Daily Star.
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Prof Abul Kashem Fazlul Haque feared for his son when he heard of the attack on Avijit Roy’s publisher Ahmedur Rashid Tutul.
Senior police officer Shibly Noman said the slaughtered body of Faisal Abedin Deepan of the Jagriti Prokashoni publishing house was found inside his office Saturday.
Two other secular writers, Wasiqur Rahman Babu and Ananta Bijoy Das, were also killed in separate attacks this year.
A publisher of a slain online critic of religious militancy has been hacked to death in the Bangladesh capital, police said, hours after similar attacks on two secular writers and another publisher in the majority-Muslim country. The local Islamist group Ansarullah Bangla Team had claimed responsibility for the blogger killings.
The attackers locked them up in the office from outside and then left the scene immediately after injuring them. All three of the victims were taken to hospital, where Tutul is in critical condition.
Gonojagoron Mancha is the activist youth group that demanded a ban on Islamist parties and maximum penalty for convicted war criminals during Bangladesh’s liberation war in 1971. Rafida Ahmed Bonya, Roy’s wife, survived the attack while losing a finger.
“The government is responsible,”said Asif Mohiuddin, a Berlin-based Bangladeshi atheist blogger who survived a machete attack by ABT militants in December 2013”.
Roy was hacked to death near a book fair in Dhaka on February 26 this year.
The attack also follows the killings in recent weeks of two foreigners, an Italian aid worker and a Japanese tourist.
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That attack was also claimed by IS jihadists, but the government responded by denying that the extremist group was active in Bangladesh, and instead rounded up dozens of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s opponents.
