[The claim of responsibility by
the division, Al Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent, was made in statements
posted on Twitter on Saturday. One of them said the two men were “worse than
the writers of such books, as they helped propagate these books and paid the
blasphemers handsome amounts of money for writing them.” A second statement,
titled “Who’s Next,” describes categories of people as “our next targets.” The
list includes writers, poets, intellectuals, newspaper or magazine editors,
reporters and actors.]
The
two men were stabbed, one fatally, eight months after a similar attack on
Avijit Roy, a Bangladeshi-American known for his critical writings on religious
extremism, the police said. Both publishing houses had issued Mr. Roy’s works.
One of the publishers, Faisal Arefin Dipan, died of his wounds
immediately, the police said. The other, Ahmed Rahim Tutul, was in critical
condition late Saturday.
The claim of responsibility by
the division, Al Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent, was made in statements
posted on Twitter on Saturday. One of them said the two men were “worse than
the writers of such books, as they helped propagate these books and paid the
blasphemers handsome amounts of money for writing them.” A second statement,
titled “Who’s Next,” describes categories of people as “our next targets.” The
list includes writers, poets, intellectuals, newspaper or magazine editors,
reporters and actors.
The statements will feed into a debate over whether
transnational terrorism groups have an organizational presence in Bangladesh
Officials have dismissed social media claims, such as the ones
made on Saturday, as inauthentic.
Mr. Tutul, the wounded publisher, had received death threats on
his cellphone over books that he had published, Mizanur Rahman, the director of
publicity for the Academic and Creative Publishers Association, said in a
telephone interview.
The attacks build on a rise in extremist violence in Bangladesh
As “hit lists” of secular writers circulate on the Internet,
many writers and journalists have become hesitant to publish work that could
attract the attention of Islamists, and a growing list of activists, fearing
for their lives, have applied for asylum in Western countries.
Around 3
p.m.
on Saturday, a group of men entered the Shuddhashar publishing house, saying
they wanted to buy books, said Biplob Kumar Sarker, the deputy police
commissioner in Dhaka . They then held two men at gunpoint while other assailants attacked
the publisher, Mr. Tutul, and two men who were in his office, Mr. Sarker said.
The assailants locked the doors from the outside when they left the premises,
and the police said that after breaking the locks, they had found all three men
on the floor with severe stab wounds.
One of the other victims was Sudip Kumar Barman, who blogs under
the name Ranadipam Basu and has published commentaries on the website curated
by Avijit Roy before his death.
About the same time, three men
entered the offices of Jagriti Publications, where they found Mr. Dipan, 43,
alone and stabbed him, leaving him with fatal neck wounds, said a spokesman at
the Shahbag police station. He was pronounced dead at Dhaka Medical College Hospital
Mr. Dipan’s business had published “The Virus of Faith,” the
book that made Mr. Roy a target for militant groups.
Mr. Dipan’s father, Abul Quashem Fazlul Huq, said in an
interview that after hearing about the attack on the first publisher, he became
worried about his son and tried to reach him by phone. He went to his son’s
business and, once the authorities had broken the lock, walked into his office,
and saw he was not in his chair.
“I saw that his neck was cut,”
he said. “The whole floor was covered with thick blood. I could not stand there
anymore. I left the place.”
For decades, Bangladesh
Over the last month, the attacks and threats have proliferated.
A month ago, Western intelligence services received information suggesting that
the Islamic State terrorist group had plans to ramp up its activities in Bangladesh
On Monday, the Ansarullah
Bangla Team, a homegrown terrorist group, sent a letter to a Bangladeshi cable
news station threatening attacks on news outlets if they continued to allow
unveiled women to report the news. On Oct. 24, bombers targeted a huge procession of Shiite Muslims in
Dhaka , killing a teenage boy. It was
the first time in memory that the country’s tiny Shiite minority had come under
attack.
Ellen
Barry reported from New
Delhi Bazar , Bangladesh
