DHAKA, Bangladesh -- A man targeted for his comments about Islam on social media was killed in a machete attack by a group of men Monday, in the second such killing in Bangladesh's capital, Dhaka, in five weeks, the police said.
Washiqur Rahman Babu was assaulted on his way to work around 9 a.m., and the police described deep wounds to his face, head and throat. Two suspects -- students at madrasas in Dhaka and Chittagong -- were taken into custody by the police, who found three machetes at the location of the crime. A third suspect escaped.
The captured men told investigators that an acquaintance had instructed them to kill Babu because "he made some comments against Islam" on social media but that they had not read the comments themselves, said Mohammed Salahuddin, the officer in charge at the police station in the neighborhood where the attack took place.
The killing was similar to one at the end of last month, when a group of men waited outside a book fair to attack Avijit Roy, a blogger of Bangladeshi origin who was based in the United States and who critiqued fundamentalist Islam on his website, which was called Mukto-Mona, or Free Mind. His wife, who was beside him at the time of the attack, suffered severe cuts to her hands and has since returned to the United States.
The only man arrested in Roy's killing is Shafiur Rahman Farabi, who has a large following among Islamist youths on social media. According to the Bangladeshi media, he had written on Facebook before the attack on Roy that he "lives in America," adding: "It is not possible to kill him now. But he will be killed when he will be back in the country."
A police official, Monirul Islam, who is overseeing the investigation into Roy's death, said the blogger had engaged in a debate with Farabi over the Internet and should have asked for police protection when he entered the country.
The police say they believe the assaults on Babu and Roy are part of a larger pattern of attacks on writers and educators who are critical of fundamentalist strains of Islam.
Although attacks based on religion are not a new phenomenon, Islam said, the profile of assailants has changed from underprivileged young men to well-educated ones who are Internet savvy and active online. He says he believes that the activists operate in small cells and are active in eight to 10 of the country's 64 districts.
"At this stage, their strategy is silent, targeted killing," Islam said. "They may have some other targets in the future."
In 2013, another Bangladeshi blogger, Rajib Haider, known online as Thaba Baba, was killed by a group of young men. He had helped organize protests that year demanding harsher punishment for perpetrators of crimes in Bangladesh's 1971 war for independence, and he was also a fierce critic of the Islamist political party Jamaat-e-Islami. Tens of thousands of mourners attended his funeral.
The police arrested five men in the attack, all university students in Dhaka. According to investigators, they had acted on an order from a leader of Islami Chhatra Shibir, an Islamist student organization, who told them that it was a religious obligation.
The men arrested in Monday's attack were identified as Jikrullah, a student of the Hathazari Madrasa in Chittagong, and Ariful Islam, a student at the Darul Ulum Madrasa in Dhaka, Salahuddin said. They told the police that they were motivated by "ideological differences" with Rhaman's online writing, Salahuddin said.
A Section on 03/31/2015