Das espoused advance of science on blog Mukto Mona.
By Raif Karerat
WASHINGTON, DC: Yet another blogger who spoke out against religious extremism has been murdered on the streets of Bangladesh, the third victim of such violent, public, and targeted attacks in as many months.
Ananta Bijoy Das, 32, was killed en route to the bank where he worked in the northeastern city of Sylhet on Tuesday. Four masked men attacked him, hacking him to death with cleavers and machetes, according to the city’s police commissioner, Kamrul Ahsan.
Due to the timing of the attack, which occurred in the early morning, there were few witnesses to corroborate accounts of the attack, but police are interviewing the few people who did see the incident occur, reported CNN.
Das was an atheist, according to CNN, and was murdered because of his contributions to the blog “Mukto Mona” (Free Thinkers), which was founded by Bangladesh-born American Avijit Roy, who also paid the ultimate price for his convictions.
In February, Roy was similarly killed with machetes and knives as he was walking home with his wife after attending a book fair in Dhaka.
One month later, 27-year-old Washiqur Rahman was hacked to death by two men with knives and meat cleavers just outside his house as he headed to work at a travel agency, also in the capital city of Dhaka.
“It’s one after another after another,” said Imran Sarker, who heads the Blogger and Online Activists Network in Bangladesh. “It’s the same scenario again and again. It’s very troubling.”
While Das was critical of fundamentalism and the attacks on secular thinkers, he was mostly concerned with championing science, a different blogger told CNN. He was the editor of a local science magazine, Jukti (“Reason”), and wrote several books, including one about one of the pioneers of evolutionary theory, Charles Darwin.
Shortly after Das was slain, hundreds of protesters took to the streets in Sylhet demanding that the government bring his killers to justice. While an obscure militant group called Ansar Bangla 7 and then Al Qaeda quickly claimed responsibility for the attack on Roy, no one has done so far for Das.