Unidentified attackers hacked to death a university professor in Bangladesh yesterday, police said, adding that the assault bore the hallmarks of previous killings by militants of secular and atheist activists.
Police said English professor Rezaul Karim Siddique, 58, was hacked from behind with machetes as he walked to a bus station from his home in Rajshahi, Bangladesh, where he taught at the city’s public university.
“His neck was hacked at least three times and was 70 to 80 percent slit. By examining the nature of the attack, we suspect that it was carried out by extremist groups,” Rajshahi Metropolitan Police commissioner Mohammad Shamsuddin said.
Photo: AFP
Shamsuddin said police had not yet named any suspects, but added that the pattern of the attack fitted with previous killings by militants.
Nahidul Islam, a deputy commissioner of police, said Siddique was involved in cultural programs, including music, and set up a music school at Bagmara Upazila, a former bastion of an outlawed Islamic fundamentalist organization, Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh.
“The attack is similar to the ones carried out on [atheist] bloggers in the recent past,” Islam said.
Homegrown militants have been blamed for a number of murders of secular bloggers and online activists since 2013, the most recent being in the capital Dhaka early this month.
Police said that in each of the attacks unidentified assailants hacked the victim to death with machetes or cleavers. Eight members of banned Islamist group Ansarullah Bangla Team, including a top cleric who is said to have founded the group, were convicted late last year for the murder of atheist blogger Ahmed Rajib Haider in February 2013.
Sakhawat Hossain, a fellow English professor from the university and a friend, said the slain teacher played the tanpura, a musical instrument popular in South Asia, and wrote poems and short stories.
“He used to lead a cultural group called Komol Gandhar and edit a biannual literary magazine with the same name, but he never wrote or spoke against religion in public,” Hossain said.
Police said Siddique was the fourth professor from Rajshahi University to have been murdered.
In February, a court handed down life sentences to two militants for the murder of another professor, Mohammad Yunus.
The recent killings have sparked outrage at home and abroad, with international rights groups demanding that the secular government protect freedom of speech in the Muslim-majority country.
Ansar al-Islam, a Bangladeshi branch of al-Qaeda on the Indian Subcontinent, this month claimed responsibility for the murder of 26-year-old Nazimuddin Samad, a law student who was killed on the streets of Dhaka, according to US monitoring group SITE Intelligence Group.
However, police blamed the Ansarullah Bangla Team for the murder.
Bangladesh authorities have consistently denied that international militant networks such as al-Qaeda or the Islamic State group, which recently claimed responsibility for the murders of minorities and foreigners, are active in the country.
A long-running political crisis in the majority Sunni, but officially secular, country has radicalized opponents of the government and analysts say militant extremists pose a growing danger.
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