presented before the media in Dhaka, Monday. AP Photo
Dhaka, March 30: A 27-year-old Bangladeshi blogger was Monday hacked to death by three machete-wielding suspected Islamists, a month after a prominent American writer was killed in a similar manner.
Washiqur Rahman Mishu was stabbed to death in broad day light in Tejgaon industrial area of Dhaka by three assailants with two of them being arrested near the crime scene. “He died on the spot as the assailants attacked him with machetes…Doctors declared him dead when he was brought to the Dhaka Medical College Hospital,” a police official said.
Three killers carried out the attack and police caught two of them with machetes from the spot red-handed, said Biplob Kumar Sarkar, deputy commissioner of Dhaka Metropolitan Police.
The blogger was killed following a conflict over “ideological difference”, a police official said while addressing a briefing. Police identified the detained persons as Jikul and Ariful Islam, students of Hathazari Madrasa in Chittagong and Darus Ulum Madrasa in the capital’s Mirpur area respectively.
Another attacker named Taher managed to escape the scene, the police officer said. During the primary interrogation, Jikul and Ariful told police about their ideological differences with Mishu’s write-ups in his blog, the official said.
Police said they have seized three machetes used for meat cleaving from the scene. Witnesses said Mishu’s face was distorted as the miscreants hacked him mainly on the face.
A private TV channel reported that Mishu used to work for an NGO and was also a blogger.
The murder came a month after Bangladeshi-American Avijit Roy, a secular blogger and science writer, was hacked to death in an identical manner in Dhaka.
Mishu was the third blogger to be killed by the suspected Islamists in the past two years with Rajeeb Haider being the first one who was hacked to death in February 2013 in Dhaka.
A Dhaka court March 18 indicted the chief of a banned Islamist outfit and seven students of a private university for the murder of Haidar. PTI
