Police in Bangladesh have arrested three suspects -- including a
British citizen -- in connection with the killings of two prominent bloggers,
Avijit Roy and Anant Bijoy Das.
The suspects are
suspected Islamist hardliners belonging a group known as "Ansarullah
Bangla Team," more commonly referred to as Ansar Bangla.
Authorities
named the British suspect as 58-year-old Touhidur Rahman. According to Rahman's
passport, he was in the United Kingdom from 1990 to 2005, said police spokesman
Maj. Gen. Maksudul Alam.
Rahman is
suspected to be the main planner behind the bloggers' killings, Alam told CNN.
The two other suspects were identified as Bangladeshi citizens Sadeq Ali Mithu
and Aminul Mollik.
Roy and Das are
among at least four bloggers who posted online pieces critical of Islam and
were killed this year in Bangladesh.
Imran Sarker,
president of the Blogger and Online Activists' Network in Bangladesh, welcomed
the reported arrests. But, he said, "the level of involvement of the
arrested suspects is not very clear. Members of our group are still getting
death threats.
"Law
enforcement agencies are not as active as we expect them to be. But the good
news is: since the last killing, police have been more active (in) reaching out
to threatened bloggers."
Fundamentalists vs. secularists
Dr. Ajit Kumar Singh, of the South Asia
Terror Portal in New Delhi, said Ansar Bangla is a newly emerged terror group.
It's said to be linked to al Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent, or AQIS, a
branch of the Islamist extremist group that formed in recent years, he said.
Ansar Bangla is
"one of the most active terror groups in Bangladesh now," and was
recently officially banned by the government there, he added.
"There is a
battle going on in Bangladesh between fundamentalists and secularists,"
Singh said. "A blogger like Niloy Neel, the last one who was killed, was
openly questioning fundamentalist thought. Organizations like Ansar Bangla
wanted to shut him up -- and scare others into not talking."
The alleged link
to the United Kingdom is not surprising, Singh added, pointing out that British
citizens have been found to be involved with Islamic fundamentalism in the
past. "This is not the first time or the last time. Radicalization in
Britain is a major concern," he said.
'Despicable' killings
The list of bloggers killed just this
year in Bangladesh makes grim reading.
In February,
Roy, a Bangladesh-born American blogger, was
killed with machetes and knives as
he walked back from a book fair in Dhaka.
A month later,
Washiqur Rahman, 27, was hacked
to death by two men with knives
and meat cleavers just outside his house as he headed to work at a travel
agency in Dhaka.
Das, 32, was hacked to death with cleavers and machetes as he left his home on his way to
work at a bank in May. And less than two weeks ago, Neel was murdered in his own Dhaka apartment.
Following his
death, rights group Amnesty International urged Bangladesh's government to send a strong
message that killings
aimed at silencing dissent are "despicable" and will not be
tolerated.
According to
Sarker, the struggle between fundamentalists and free thinkers began in early
2013, "when the liberal bloggers got united and started a movement against
radicalization of the society by the militant groups.
"Before,
the bloggers used to work on an individual level. When the young liberal
bloggers in Bangladesh became unified and started being more vocal, the
militant groups felt threatened and started threatening and killing
bloggers."
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