Attacks by Islamic extremists in Bangladesh
The perceived mildness of the sentence was condemned by Bangladesh's secularist bloggers and writers, who helped organize the 2013 Shahbag protests in response, calling for the death penalty for Molla.
"[18] A number of non-governmental organisations (NGOs), including Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, Reporters without Borders, PEN International, PEN Canada and the Committee to Protect Journalists have criticized the government for failing to protect its citizens and for not condemning the attacks,[19] and have condemned the imprisonment of bloggers as an attack on free speech, which they say is contributing to a climate of fear for Bangladeshi journalists.
[33] Haider was an organizer of the Shahbag movement,[31] a group "which seeks death for war criminals and a ban on Jamaat-e-Islami and its student front Islami Chhatra Shibir.
On a social media website, the group declared: "Our Mujahideens [fighters] executed a 'Murtad' [apostate] today in Rajshahi who had prohibited female students in his department to wear 'Burka' [veil].
"[13] The website also quoted a 2010 article from a newspaper affiliated with Jamaat-e-Islami stating that "Professor Shafiul Islam, while being the chair of the sociology department, recruited teachers on condition of being clean-shaved and not wearing kurta-pajamas.
[17][39] Roy and his wife had been returning home from the Ekushey Book Fair by bicycle rickshaw[17] when around 8:30 p.m. they were attacked near the Teacher Student Center intersection of Dhaka University by unidentified assailants.
"[52] Asia director of Human Rights Watch Brad Adams said of Ananta's killing, "This pattern of vicious attacks on secular and atheist writers not only silences the victims but also sends a chilling message to all in Bangladesh who espouse independent views on religious issues.
[58] Niloy had written in Mukto-Mona, a blogging platform for secularists and freethinkers,[56] was associated with the Shahbag Movement;[59] he and his friend Sahedul Sahed had attended the public protest demanding justice for the murdered bloggers, Ananta Bijoy Das and Avijit Roy.
Both his father Abul Qasem Fazlul Huq, a scholar and a professor of Bengali literature, and mother Farida Pradhan, principal house tutor of Rokeya Hall, retired from Dhaka University.
The book documents the horrific experience of survival of these women and girls in Pakistani military camps and takes a critical look at the social structure that they struggled to rejoin after the war was over.
[77] In the twenty-three years of operation of Jagriti, Dipan had published around sixteen hundred books and collaborated with many famous and upcoming writers of Bangladesh like Sufia Kamal, Nirmalindu Goon, Rudra Mohammad Shahidullah, Badruddin Umar, Selina Hossain, Selim Al Deen and Muhammed Zafar Iqbal to name a few.
[80] Avijit Roy, the slain Bangladeshi-American online activist, writer and blogger, was known to Dipan from his early childhood in the Dhaka University campus area where they lived in the same neighbourhood and attended Udayan Bidyalaya.
[82][83] Dipan was brutally hacked to death by a group of suspected religious fundamentalists in the afternoon of 31 October 2015, while he was working alone inside his office at Aziz Supermarket in Dhaka.
His body was found in a pool of blood by the local market authorities and his father, who had to break into Jagriti Prokashony office left locked from inside by the murders, and had several injury marks of sharp weapons like machetes.
[71][72][73] Dipan's murder coincided with the attack on another publisher of Avijit Roy, Ahmedur Rashid Tutul (proprietor of Shuddhoswar Prokashony), who survived a similar brutal hacking inside his office in a different part of Dhaka in the same afternoon.
[84][85] Some local sleeper cells of international terrorist groups like Al-Qaeda and the so-called Islamic State have claimed responsibilities of the attacks on secular writers, free thinkers and human rights activists in Bangladesh.
[86][87][88] The law enforcement authorities of Bangladesh have been in active pursuit of the perpetrators with some success since their anti-terror drive has intensified following the Holy Artisan terror attacks in Gulshan.
[89][90][91] Dipan's death was widely covered in global and local media, had sparked outrage among general public and received strong condemnation from many organisations including the UN and the US Embassy in Dhaka.
[96][97][99] The day was also marked by a large human chain of mourners and protesters, near Aziz Super Market in Dhaka, demanding immediate arrest and speedy trial of Dipan's killers.
[106][107] Shahjahan Bachchu an acting editor of weekly Amader Bikrampur and former general secretary of Munshiganj chapter of Communist Party of Bangladesh shot dead on 11 June 2018.
After an initial wave of attacks focused solely on secularists, most of them atheists, the targets broadened to include other activists, members of religious minority groups, and representatives of Bengali or western culture.
[128] Mir Sanaur Rahman provided free treatment to villagers, and his murderers, who belonged to Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh, are said to have chosen him as a target because they bungled their research when seeking possible victims.
[135] On 2 July 2016 Mong Shwe Lung Marma, a Buddhist farmer and the vice president of ward seven of the Awami league, was hacked to death and assassinated in Bandarban.
Nazimuddin Samad (1988 – 6 April 2016) was a law student at Jagannath University and liberal blogger who was reportedly killed by suspected radical Islamists in Dhaka for his promotion of secularism in Bangladesh.
[139][140] However, Imran H Sarker, convener of the Gonojagaran Mancha said that the murder had been committed by government collusion in order divert attention from the rape and killing of Sohagi Jahan Tonu, a student of Comilla University.
[140][141] On 5 June 2016 Mahmuda Khanam Mitu, the wife of a Bangladesh Police superintendent Babul Aktar, was stabbed, shot in the head, and killed by three suspected outside of her apartment at a busy road junction in Chittagong.
On 4 July 1994, an arrest warrant was issued for her under an old statute dating to the British colonial period outlawing writings "intended to outrage ... religious believers", and she went underground.
[149] In 2003 Bangladeshi secular author and critic Humayun Azad wrote a book named Pak Sar Jamin Saad Baad criticising the political party, Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami.
[151] On 12 August 2004 Azad was found dead in his apartment in Munich, Germany, where he had arrived a week earlier to conduct research on the 19th-German romantic poet Heinrich Heine.
[1] On 18 August 2015 three members of Ansarullah Bangla Team, including a British citizen named Touhidur Rahman who police described as "the main planner of the attacks on Avijit Roy and Ananta Bijoy Das", had been arrested in connection with the two murders.
