Key Points

• Two pro-democracy bloggers were killed by Islamist activists in Bangladesh in little over one month.
• The killings highlighted the growing prominence of Islamist vigilantism in the country and its growing threat.
• The attacks occurred during a period of ongoing serious political and societal tension and perhaps also reflect increasing religious intolerance in the country.

The killing of two bloggers in separate incidents in the Bangladeshi capital Dhaka in late February and March has drawn international attention to a renewed spate of Islamist vigilantism in the country, which since early 2013 has increasingly manifested itself in attacks against pro-democracy activists who express critical views of fundamentalist Islam via social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter.

The murders occurred amid the ongoing political turmoil that has gripped Bangladesh since January, when the opposition Bangladeshi Nationalist Party (BNP) and its allies – including the influential Islamist party Jamaat-e-Islami (JeI) – called for countrywide strikes and protest rallies against the Bangladesh Awami League government. The protests were called to mark the first anniversary of the controversial election in January 2014, which the Awami League won after a boycott by the BNP and other opposition parties, and the murder of the two bloggers risks further exacerbating the unrest.

Police examine the site of the attack on Bangladeshi-American blogger Avijit Roy in Bangladesh’s capital Dhaka on 26 February. (PA)

Critical thinkers

In the first of the two recent incidents, Bangladeshi-American blogger Avijit Roy was killed and his wife Rafida was seriously wounded when assailants attacked the pair with a meat cleaver as they returned from a book fair at Dhaka university campus on 26 February. One month later, on 30 March, Oyasiqur Rahman Babu, who was also active on social media and ran a blog promoting free speech, was killed by three assailants in a similar attack.

In both cases, the initial inquiry indicated that the men were targeted because of their promotion of free speech on social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, where they wrote on atheism, religious prejudices, and human rights. Roy in particular was regarded as one of the pioneers of the Bangladeshi blogging scene, and had promoted other Bengali bloggers through the Mukto-mona (Free Mind) web portal, which is now offline. In 2014, he published a book entitled The Virus of Faith , and in a posthumously published paper of the same name he had argued that “religious extremism is a contagious virus” that is afflicting the entire human race, citing as evidence the January 2015 attack on the Charlie Hebdo magazine in Paris, France; the December 2014 Peshawar school attack in Pakistan; and the December 1992 demolition of the Babri Masjid in India by a right-wing Hindu mob. The paper also detailed how, as a result of Roy’s campaigning against religious extremism, he had received repeated threats from Islamist extremists.

Meanwhile, Babu’s web postings had been similarly critical of the role of Islamist parties in Bangladesh, and he was a member of prominent bloggers’ group the Logical Forum, which is critical of all religions, including Islam. Notably, in the weeks before his death, Babu had published a number of tributes to Roy following the latter’s murder, posting messages such as “I am Avijit” and “Words cannot be killed” on his Facebook page.

Arrests

Police investigating Roy’s murder arrested Farabi Shafiur Rahman in connection with the killing on 2 March. Rahman was a former student at Chittagong University, and prior to Roy’s murder had regularly denounced him in social media postings, with one post in January stating, “It’s a holy duty of Bengalee Muslims to kill Avijit [Roy].” However, although admitting issuing such threats, Rahman has denied responsibility for Roy’s killing, and he had not been charged with the murder at the time of writing, being held instead under the Information and Communication Technology Act.

Meanwhile, two suspects in the Babu killing were apprehended at the scene by passers-by, while a third escaped. Following an interrogation of the two captured suspects, police reported that the men were members of the Hathazari Madrassa (Islamic school) in Chittagong and the Darul Uloom Madrassa of Mirpur in Dhaka, both of which are run by the radical Islamist organisation Hefazat-e-Islam (HeI). Although HeI itself is not directly implicated in the killings, the group is known for its hostile stance towards proponents of secular ideas, having called in its March 2013 manifesto for the introduction of a blasphemy law – carrying the death penalty – intended to target secular scholars and atheist bloggers.

Police deputy commissioner of Tejgaon zone Biplab Kumar Sarker subsequently told reporters on 31 March that the men had confessed to killing Babu because of his writings. However, the commissioner revealed that the men were not actually familiar with Babu’s work themselves, and did not appear to know what blogging actually was.

ABT involvement?

Police are also investigating the possible involvement of the Bangladeshi Islamist extremist group Ansarullah Bangla Team (ABT), which rose to prominence after it was implicated in a previous spate of violence directed at secular Bangladeshis in early 2013, during the so-called Shahbagh protests.

The Shahbagh protests – named after the area of Dhaka where they took place – had been triggered by the handing of a life sentence to senior JeI leader Abdul Quader Mollah following his conviction for war crimes committed during the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War. Many had expected the death penalty for the Islamist leader, and Mollah’s life sentence was seen by pro-democracy groups as evidence of undue Islamist influence in national politics. Thousands of pro-democracy activists took to the streets of Dhaka to protest at the sentence, and to call for JeI to be banned from politics, sparking days of fighting between rival Islamist activists from HeI and the JeI’s student wing, Islami Chhatra Shibir (ICS).

The clashes culminated with the murder of prominent pro-democracy blogger and activist Ahmed Rajib Haider, who was hacked to death by a machete-wielding group outside his home in the Mirpur area of the city on 13 February 2013. The attack came one month after another award-winning blogger-activist, Asif Mohiuddin, was severely wounded in a similar attack on 14 January. Both Rajib and Asif had been activists with Ganajagaran Mancha, a secular social movement that demanded maximum penalties for convicted war criminals from the 1971 war.

On 2 March 2013, police arrested five suspected militants from the ABT, which they described as a newly-formed offshoot of the ICS. The men, all students at North South University, a private college in Dhaka, claimed in their confessions that they had acted at the behest of the ABT’s alleged spiritual leader, Jasim Uddin Rahmani. Rahmani was subsequently arrested in August that year, and was charged with Haider’s murder along with seven other alleged ABT members, all of whom are currently awaiting trial. On 18 March 2015, Rahmani denied the charges against him.

Before his arrest, Rahmani had established a reputation as a radical preacher known for denouncing pro-democracy activists and other “atheists” in his sermons. His books, such as Unmukto Torobari (Open Sword) and Islam-O-Attoghati Musulman (Islam and Suicidal Muslims), also encouraged the targeting of atheists. An eloquent speaker in Arabic and Bengali, Rahmani disseminated his sermons online via YouTube, while his followers published online propaganda in Arabic, Bengali, and Urdu.

Attesting to Rahmani’s influence at the time of his arrest in August 2013, the deputy commissioner of Bangladesh’s Detective Branch, Moshiur Rahman, claimed Rahmani had at least 3,000 followers in madrassas and universities across Bangladesh.

Moreover, the ABT’s online presence on the Al-Qaeda-affiliated Ansar al-Mujahideen English language forum and other similar websites – where the group has expressed support for the Taliban and Al-Qaeda, and acknowledged now deceased Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) ideologue Anwar Al-Awlaki as an inspiration – provides further indications of the group’s seeming affiliation with the transnational jihadist movement beyond Bangladesh.

Notably, Al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri issued a statement in January 2014 entitled Bangladesh: Massacre Behind a Wall of Silence, in which he urged Bangladeshis to rally around “the true scholars of Islam” for a “massive public uprising in defence of Islam”, and specifically cited the killing of Haider the year before. Similarly, the most recent issue of the Al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent (AQIS) publication Resurgence , published in late 2014, called for further attacks in Bangladesh on atheist, free-speech bloggers such as Haider, whom AQIS claimed had “insulted” Islam.

Outlook

As in 2013, it is notable that the recent attacks targeting Bangladeshi pro-democracy bloggers occurred against a backdrop of heightened and ongoing political tension, and it appears that hardline Islamist elements are seeking to take advantage of the fragile political situation in the country, orchestrating violent attacks on pro-democracy or anti-Islamic elements in a bid to further polarise Bangladesh along religious lines.

Meanwhile, although the murder of the bloggers was widely condemned, many in Bangladesh are sympathetic to the Islamists’ claims that such bloggers are defaming Islam, the state religion. Consequently, the Awami League government appears reluctant to play into the hands of the rival BNP by cracking down on the Islamists and appearing to align itself with what is perceived to be an anti-Islamic movement. Even some pro-democracy groups, wary of the democracy movement becoming associated with anti-Islamic atheists, have joined HeI and other Islamist groups in calling for tighter restrictions on posting comments online that hurt religious sentiment by criticising Islam.

Bangladesh does not have a blasphemy law like Pakistan. However, the country has provisions under Section 205 of the Penal Code that allow for the imprisonment of those found guilty of deliberately or maliciously hurting religious sentiments. Similarly, the 2006 Information and Communication Technology Act bans the publication of online material that can hurt religious sentiments or beliefs. Moreover, the government has previously shown its willingness to use these laws to curtail the activities of secular pro-democracy activists.

Following the Shahbagh protests, at least four secular bloggers, including Mohiuddin, were imprisoned in early April 2013 for their blog posts on Islam and the Prophet Muhammad. The arrests were intended to appease the pro-Islamic activists and to restore law and order in general, but generated severe international and domestic criticism. Mohiuddin was subsequently released in August that year due to health concerns, while the others were granted conditional release in May 2013, shortly after their initial detention.

Consequently, although the recent attacks on bloggers promoting secular values are in part a product of growing grassroots Islamist activism, they also reflect a wider and related trend towards religious intolerance that has increased discernibly in Bangladesh in the past two-to-three years. As such, the attacks – and the clashes between Islamists and secular activists more generally – risk not just fuelling political instability in the near term, but also a steady chilling of freedom of speech and religious debate that has longer-term implications for the country.