Another secular blogger hacked to death

Dhaka: A 40-year-old secular Bangladeshi blogger was hacked to death at his flat here today by five machete-wielding unidentified assailants, the fourth such brutal murder in the country this year.

Niloy Neel was killed by assailants inside his fifth- floor flat at North Gorhan in the capital Dhaka. "The assassins used machetes... It appears they hit him repeatedly until he was dead," Mostafizur Rahman, officer in charge of the police station in the neighbourhood, said.

He said Neel, an official of a non-government organisation, used to live in the apartment building along with his family members and was known for his secular write ups in blogs. Rahman said five assailants had entered the flat after the Friday prayers and killed him. Neel was an activist of a platform -- the Ganajagaran Mancha which waged a massive campaign for the capital punishment for war criminals who carried out atrocities siding with the Pakistani troops in 1971. "Niloy was also a regular blogger...He was a target of the Islamists," Imran H Sarker, the Ganajagaran Mancha spokesperson, said, adding the attackers had entered the building posing as potential tenants.

Media reports said Criminal Investigation Department (CID) joined the police in collecting evidence related to the incident.

Neel's murder is the fourth such brutal murder in the country. Machete-wielding masked men in May hacked to death 33-year-old Ananta Bijoy Das, a secular blogger, in Sylhet city.

Assailants in February had killed 45-year old Avijit Roy, a Bangladeshi-born US national, here while his wife narrowly escaped the attack. A month after Roy's killing, another blogger Washiqur Rahman was murdered in similar fashion in Dhaka but people in the neighbourhood nabbed two suspected killers from the scene and handed them over to police. All three killed were involved with the Ganajagaran Mancha.