Avijit Roy (Bengali: অভিজিৎ রায়; 12 September 1972 – 26 February 2015)[6] was a Bangladeshi-American engineer, online activist, writer, and blogger known for creating and administrating the Mukto-Mona, an Internet blogging community for Bangladeshi freethinkers, rationalists, skeptics, atheists, and humanists.
He was killed by machete-wielding assailants in Dhaka, Bangladesh, on 26 February 2015; the Islamic militant organization Ansarullah Bangla Team claimed responsibility for the attack.
[25][26] We aim to build a society which will not be bound by the dictates of arbitrary authority, comfortable superstition, stifling tradition, or suffocating orthodoxy but would rather be based on reason, compassion, humanity, equality, and science.A Bangladeshi group, Blogger and Online Activist Network (BOAN), initiated the 2013 Shahbag protests that sought capital punishment for the Islamist leader and war criminal Abdul Quader Molla, as well as the removal of Jamaat-e-Islami from politics.
[27][28] Islamist groups responded by organizing protests calling for the execution of "atheist bloggers" accused of insulting Islam and the introduction of a blasphemy law.
[19] A month before the protest, blogger Asif Mohiuddin was attacked outside his house by four youths influenced by Anwar Al-Awlaki,[31] and Sunnyur Rahman, known as Nastik Nobi ("Atheist Prophet"), was stabbed on 7 March 2013.
[32] Asif Mohiuddin, a winner of the BOBs award for online activism, was on an Islamist hit list that also included the murdered sociology professor Shafiul Islam.
[1] Avijit's body was placed at Aparajeyo Bangla in front of the Faculty of Arts building at Dhaka University on 1 March 2015, where people from all walks of life, including his friends, relatives, well-wishers, teachers, and students, gathered with flowers to pay their respect to the writer.
[47] On 6 March 2015, a four-member team from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), along with members of the detective branch of Bangladesh Police, inspected the spot where Roy was killed.
[48][49] On 3 May 2015, the leader of Al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent (AQIS) claimed responsibility for Roy's murder and the deaths of other "blasphemers" in Bangladesh in a report published by the SITE Intelligence Group.
[54] On 18 August 2015, three members of the 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", were arrested in connection with the two murders.
[56] After Roy's death, several students, teachers, bloggers, and around the country gathered at Dhaka University, demanding quick arrest of the killers.
"[66] The British High Commissioner Robert Gibson expressed his concern in a tweet saying, "Shocked by the savage murder of Avijit Roy as I am by all the violence that has taken place in Bangladesh in recent months".