Unidentified attackers forced Niloy Neel’s wife and sister-in-law into an adjoining room before hacking him to death, sub-inspector of police Mohammad Khairuzzaman said by phone.
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In May, terror group al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent (AQIS) had claimed responsibility for the killing of secular bloggers in Bangladesh whom it described as “blasphemers”.
Neel lived in that flat with his family.
“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 e-mail.
According to reports, five assailants armed with machetes entered his flat in two groups posing as potential tenants after the Juma prayers. Machete-wielding masked men in May hacked to death 33-year-old Ananta Bijoy Das, a secular blogger, in Sylhet city.
All four bloggers killed were involved with the Ganajagaran Mancha.
In 2014, Reporters Without Borders reported that a group calling itself Defenders of Islam in Bangladesh had published a “hit list” of writers it saw as opposing Islam. “While Avijit and I were being ruthlessly attacked, the local police stood close by and did not act”, Rafida told Reuters.
Assistant Commissioner of Dhaka Metropolitan Police Md Nure Alam told the Dhaka Tribune that police recovered the body of Niloy Chakrabarti on Friday afternoon.
Tragically, these three deaths are not an aberration. “Nine of them are already killed and many of them were attacked”.
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Sagar Sarowar and Meherun Runi, two well-known married Bangladeshi journalists were stabbed to death in February 2012; the motive is still to be determined. Washiqur Rahman, another blogger who reportedly wrote “against religious fundamentalism”, was hacked to death, a month after Roy’s killing.
