“This week, another humanist blogger in Bangladesh, law student Nazimuddin Samad, was killed on the streets of Dhaka by religious extremists for daring to criticize harmful religious beliefs, stand up for the rights of religious minorities, and promote a secular society, writes Maggie Ardiente, Senior Editor at TheHumanist.com in the USA. “If this news wasn’t outrageous enough, consider how this tragedy is being handled in Bangladesh— according to the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU), rather than finding the extremists that committed this terrible crime, the country’s Home Minister said, “It is needed to see whether [Nazim] has written anything objectionable in his blogs.”
This was reported in the Daily Sun, in an interview with BBC Bangla Service, Home Minister Asaduzzaman Khan Kamal today said that the write-ups of the slain secular activist Nazimuddin Samad are needed to be scrutinised to see whether he wrote anything objectionable about religion.
Concerning the event itself, attackers in Bangladesh wielding machetes killed the liberal blogger on April 7, 2016, the latest in a series of murders of secular activists. Postgraduate law student Nazimuddin Samad, 28, was attacked as he was returning from a class at his university in the capital, Dhaka. Three or four men attacked Samad with machetes and then shot him after he fell to the ground. Samad was critical of radical Islamists and used to campaign for secularism on Facebook.
Samad is the son of Shamshul Haque from Bianibazar area of Sylhet. He was the information and research secretary of Sylhet district unit Bangabandhu Jatiya Jubo Parishad. He was also an activist of Gonojagoron Moncho’s Sylhet wing.
During the murder, the killers were chanting “Allahu Akbar,” police said quoting locals.
Last year, suspected militants killed five secular writers including Avijit Roy, a U.S. citizen of Bangladeshi origin and his publisher Faisal Arefin Dipan.
Avijit Roy was hacked to death near a book fair in the capital Dhaka in February last year — the first in a series of attacks that targetted atheist and secular bloggers in Bangladesh. Avijit Roy was a also a prolific writer and had wrote a dozen books, mostly about science, philosophy and materialism. His last books Obisshahser Dorshon (The Philosophy of Disbelief) and Biswasher Virus (The Virus of Faith), were well received. In the Virus of Faith his main argument was that “faith-based terrorism will wreak havoc on society in epidemic proportions”. He also edited a popular blog Mukto-Mona.
Police blamed the attacks on the banned local Islamist militant group Ansarullah Bangla Team (ABT).
[additional notes from Counterpunch]
