Unidentified assailants have killed a blogger after forcing their way into his apartment in the Bangladeshi capital city of Dhaka.
According to the Bangladeshi Blogger and Activist Network on Friday, a gang attacked Niloy Chakrabarti at his home in Dhaka’s Goran neighborhood and hacked him to death with machetes.
“They entered his room in the fifth floor and shoved his friend aside and then hacked him to death,” AFP quoted the network’s head, Imran H. Sarker, as saying.
The Bangladeshi police confirmed the incident, but stated that no information has yet been acquired on the identity and motive of the attackers.
“There were six people who knocked his door, saying that they were looking to rent a flat… Two of them then took him to a room and then slaughtered him there,” said Muntashirul Islam, a Bangladeshi deputy police commissioner, adding, “His wife was in the flat but she was confined to another room.”
Following the deadly attack, Bangladeshi activists paid tribute to Chakrabarti, who wrote under the pen name Niloy Neel.
Asif Mohiuddin, another Bangladeshi activist who himself survived an attempt on his life in 2013, hailed the slain blogger as a “free thinker” who was against any form of “fundamentalism” and “was a founding member of a rationalist organization.”
This is the fourth in a string of deadly attacks against bloggers in the South Asian country.
The rising violence garnered harsh criticism from writers and activists all over the world, with many of them, including the renowned Canadian writer Margaret Atwood, urging the government of the Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina in a petition “to do all in their power to ensure that the tragic events of the last three months are not repeated, and to bring the perpetrators to justice.”
“We are gravely concerned by this escalating pattern of violence against writers and journalists who are peacefully expressing their views,” read their petition.