The savage attacks in Bangladesh continue as another Hindu priest falls prey to a brutal murder on the morning of July 1. The internal wars called in the country have mostly killed the Islamist radicals and minorities in gruesome ways. This is the fifth such incidents against Hindus in a month and the community is highly terrorised.
The Hindu priest Shyamanondo Das, a resident of Jhenaidah, was collecting flowers in the morning while three assailants on a motorcycle hacked him to death with machetes.
The Muslim majority country has witnessed a steady rise in Islamist violence and more than 40 people have been killed since February 2013.
Like every time, the police and law investigation agencies are clueless about the motive behind the attack. However, keeping the incident in line with the previous hackings carried out by local Islamist militants, they have arrested a youth associated with Jamaat-e-Islami regarding the murder.
Secular bloggers, academics, intelligentsia, minority community members- there is a long list of fragments who have been heavily targeted in the mindless violence. On June 7 itself, a 65-year-old Hindu priest was brutally killed in a rice paddy field in the same district whereas a Christian businessman was murdered by machete-wielding men on 5th June.
In February, some militants stabbed to death a Hindu priest at a temple in the country and shot and wounded a devotee who went to his aid.
In April, a liberal professor was brutally hacked to death by machete-wielding ISIS militants who slit his throat near his home in Rajshahi city. It was followed by another hacking in the same month when a Hindu tailor was also hacked to death by ISIS militants in his shop and Bangladesh’s first gay magazine editor was brutally murdered along with a friend in his flat in Dhaka by Islamists.
The ISIS and al-Qaeda in Indian Peninsula have claimed responsibility for most of the attacks in the past although the government denies their presence in Bangladesh.
These series of attacks also underlines the amount of insecurity felt by minorities in the Muslim-majority nation. To make matters worse, dreaded terrorist groups ISIS and Al-Qaeda had claimed responsibility for some of them.Bangladesh government has refuted claims of ISIS presence in its country. Instead, opposition parties and local Islamist groups have been blamed for the killings.
