Omi Rahman Pial has changed homes five times in the past three months. He has not seen his young daughter in weeks and is afraid to be seen on the streets of Dhaka, Bangladesh’s capital and home to several grisly killings of secular bloggers like him.
“I am a refugee in my own country and under the threat of being killed, nowhere to go,” Pial said. “Where should I go?”
“So if you want to see the maximum punishment a blogger could get in Bangladesh, look at me,” he said.
Fear is running high following months in which four bloggers and three other people have been killed, allegedly by Muslim extremists. Many bloggers have gone into hiding, and some have left the nation.
Authorities blame the opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) and its main ally, Jamaat-e-Islami, saying they want to destabilize the country ahead of executions, expected this year, of two influential politicians from the two parties for war crimes.
Some of the people killed were involved in a movement that has pressed for capital punishment for those politicians and several others for actions during the country’s 1971 war of independence against Pakistan.
Two of the politicians have been executed.
The parties deny involvement in the killings, saying Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s government is encouraging people to strike back by cracking down on its opponents.
The Islamic State group has claimed responsibility, but authorities deny that the Sunni group has any presence in the nation.
The blogger attacks have made many fear the rise of religious radicalism in the Muslim-majority nation, known since independence for its secularism.
The first strike this year came in February when American-Bangladeshi blogger and writer Avijit Roy was hacked to death as he and his wife walked on the campus of Dhaka University. Three other secular bloggers have been killed in daylight attacks in Dhaka and outside.
Early this fall, two foreigners — an Italian aid worker and a Japanese agriculture researcher — were killed within a week of each other.
The Islamic State group claimed responsibility, as it did on Oct. 31, when assailants attacked two book publishers in their Dhaka offices, with one died man killed and three others critically injured.
“I am scared. They may kill me anytime,” Pial said in an apartment he shares with another blogger who has also gone into hiding, fearing for his life.
“I have not seen my six-year-old daughter for weeks, my wife is safe for now as she is outside the country with a scholarship. I don’t go outside for days,” Pial said.
“It’s a difficult time for us, for the nation,” he said. “I don’t know where we are heading to.”
Pial often appears on television talk shows and stands against religious ideologies, war criminals and the Jamaat-e-Islami party, which he says should be banned for extremism and its stand against the nation’s independence.
He views the killings as part of a “pseudo-war” against the ongoing war-crimes proceedings, which he has advocated for years.
Authorities say recent violence, including the killings of bloggers and foreigners, is aimed at derailing the executions of influential BNP leader Salahuddin Quader Chowdhury and Jamaat-e-Islami leader Ali Ahsan Mohammad Mujahid.
The Bangladeshi Supreme Court has upheld a special tribunal’s verdict for their execution; the defendants’ petitions for a final review of the judgement is to be heard on Monday next week.
Clemency is unlikely from the president, as Hasina has said war criminals should get the maximum punishment.
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