Police confirmed Chakrabarti, 30, was murdered at his home in the capital’s Goran neighbourhood by a group of four people who had pretended to be looking for a place to rent.
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Dhaka Police spokesman, Muntashirul Islam, said, “We know that Niloy used to work for non-governmental organisations in the past but we are not aware of his journalistic identity”.
Asha Moni, wife of the slain blogger, later told reporters that one of the young men attacked him shouting “Allahu Akbar (God is greatest)”. Radical group Ansar Bangla Team had also claimed responsibility for the deaths.
Most secular bloggers have gone into hiding, often using pseudonyms in their posts, or have fled overseas.
Online activists and secular bloggers who write on rationalism and criticize orthodox religious or fundamental beliefs are often targeted by jihadist groups in Bangladesh.
A tribunal has since convicted several senior leaders of an Islamist party, who in 1971 opposed the breakaway of Bangladesh, then known as East Pakistan, from Pakistan, of various crimes.
He recently posted on Facebook that two strangers followed him after he attended a protest over Ananta Bijoy Das’s murder, the secular blogger murdered in May.
He is the fourth blogger to have been killed in Bangladesh since February, The Guardian reported, noting that he had told police of threats against him and requested protection weeks before he died.
“There is little doubt that these especially brutal killings are designed to sow fear and to have a chilling effect on free speech”, David Griffiths, South Asia research director at Amnesty global, said in an email.
“The government needs to establish much more clearly who is behind these attacks”, Galhotra told Fusion.
The victim’s family said his real name was Niloy Chottopadhay and that he used a different name on social media.
The US has termed Neel’s killing as a “cowardly murder” and underlined the need to counter violent extremism.
This is the fourth incident where a blogger in Bangladesh was killed by “Islamist militants” this year, according to ABC News.
In a recent petition addressed to Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, authors including Salman Rushdie and Margaret Atwood called on her government “to do all in their power to ensure that the tragic events of the last three months are not repeated, and to bring the perpetrators to justice”.
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Former moderator for Mukto-Mona, Roy was an ardent proponent of secularism in Bangladesh, a country considered secular but where 90% of the 160 million inhabitants are Muslims.
