"I
saw him lying upside down and in a massive pool of blood. They slaughtered his
neck. He is dead,” said the victim’s father in an interview with the AFP new
source per a BBC journalist covering the real life horror story that occurred this
Saturday in Bangladesh. Found in his Jagriti Publishing third-floor city
centre office in Dhaka, 43 year old secular publisher Faisal Arefin Dipon was
not the only publishing-related victim yesterday. Before Dipon’s tragedy,
another secular publisher, Ahmedur Rashid Tutul, and his writers,Tareque Rahim
and Ranadeep Basu, were also brutally attacked and left to die in a Dhaka
office where they had been locked in by their assailants. After being taken to
the hospital, one of the three surviving victims is believed to be in critical
condition.
Both
the murder and attempted murders of these men have been claimed by the
Bangladeshi al-Qaeda offshoot group Ansar al-Islam, and are just the latest
Dhaka atrocities committed against victims who write or publish material
containing opinions that are contrary to radical Islamic beliefs. Bangladeshi citizens
responded by holding protests in the streets to show support for the
individuals who were preyed upon. Both of Saturday’s publisher
victims had published works by Avijit Roy, an anti-radical Islam blogger killed
on February 27th. Since then, during a period of 8 months, three more
bloggers have been killed, and now, one of their publishers.
The
repeated al-Qaeda-related attacks on secular writers and their publishers in
Bangladesh are a sad commentary on the state of the country’s control over
terrorism. The central government and local authorities seem either ineffective
or apathetic in providing security for potential victims, which will no doubt
embolden the terrorists. One can’t help but wonder if the authorities are
sympathetic to the radical Islamic cause or scared of it. And will the U.S.
take a stand on such atrocities to aid the people of Bangladesh like they did
for the lawyer’s son in China?
Amanda
Zgonina
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