In Bangladesh, Religious Extremists Stalk 'Free Thinkers'

Updated at 6 p.m. ET on 2015-08-28

The five men died for speaking out against a wave of fundamentalist religious sentiment sweeping across their country, whose constitution embraces secularism as one of its “high ideals.”

Bloggers Niladri Chottopaddhya, Ananta Bijoy Das, Washiqur Rahman, Avijit Roy and Ahmed Rajib Haider were killed by suspected Islamists in the same manner: they were hacked to death with machetes.

Four were killed in 2015. But the spate of murders targeting “free thinkers” – as secularists and atheists are known in Bangladesh – began in February 2013, with Haider’s killing.

He died after playing an active role in public demonstrations at Dhaka’s Shahbag Square against accused war criminals from Bangladesh’s 1971 war of independence.

Four of the five killings were carried out in public. But the Aug. 7 killing of Chottopaddhya, who went by the pen name Niloy Neel, was different. His killers burst into his apartment home in a Dhaka suburb, where they went after him with the long knives as they confined his wife in another room.

Al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent (AQIS), the South Asian branch of al-Qaeda, claimed responsibility for three of the murders.

“If your ‘Freedom of Speech’ maintains no limits, then widen your chests for ‘Freedom of our Machetes’,” said a statement issued Friday by Ansar Al Islam, the Bangladesh branch of AQIS.

An earlier version of this story incorrectly identified Niladri Chottopaddhya as Niladri Chakrabarty.