The Australian has more on Bangladesh’s way with atheist bloggers:
Of his part in the gruesome machete murder on Monday of a Bangladeshi blogger — the second in five weeks — Jikrullah, a 20-year-old madrassa student offered only this as explanation: “I stabbed him because he humiliated my Prophet”.
In a country at war with itself over whether to identify first as a nation of Bengalis or as a Muslim state, that — it seems — for many is explanation enough.
Jikrullah made an eight-hour road trip from Chittagong in Bangladesh’s south east corner on Sunday to join two other seminary students in the Monday attack on Washiqur Rahman…
Because Rahman “humiliated” a man who’s been dead for 14 centuries. Humans your petty little passions and devotions aren’t worth killing people over. I love sunsets, but I don’t get to kill people who prefer to watch tv.
For many Bangladeshi writers Rahman’s death, five weeks after a similar fatal attack on blogger Avijit Roy, is a terminal blow to free speech in a country that fought a brutal war with Pakistan for the right to independence and a secular constitution.
Bangladeshi feminist writer Taslima Nasreen, forced into exile in 1994 over death threats following the publication of her book Lajja and now living in New Delhi, posted a series of angry tweets in the hours after his death including gruesome pictures of Rahman’s body, lying in a pool of blood where he was felled.
“Look how Islamists killed free thinker Washiqur Rahman Babu. Islamists claim ‘Islam is a religion of peace’,” she tweeted.
She knows they would do that to her if they could.
More than 100 people have been killed in recent clashes between supporters of the nominally secular government under Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina and her Bangladesh Awami Party and the opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party, led by Khaleda Zia who boycotted last year’s general elections and has since called for fresh elections to be held.
But an editorial in the Dhaka Tribune said the latest murders fit a pattern of attacks over the past decade in which “15 academics and writers had been murdered in similar circumstances … for their views on religion”, and warned more would follow unless the government ended a culture of impunity for those who “praise threaten or incite violence”.
“Failure to do so only emboldens individuals who are minded to carry out such acts,” it said.
But they also don’t mind being executed, because they think they’re going to paradise.