Suspect held over publisher attack in Bangladesh – Hindu lecturer seriously wounded

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DHAKA, June 16, (AFP): An Islamist militant suspected of attacking a publisher last year has been arrested, Bangladesh police said Thursday, in what they described as an important breakthrough in their investigations into a spate of horrific attacks. Suman Hossain Patowari, 20, was arrested in Dhaka late Wednesday over a brutal attack that wounded publisher Ahmedur Rashid Tutul and two others at his office in the capital in October.

The arrest comes amid a nationwide police anti-militant crackdown that has seen more than 11,000 people, including 176 suspected Islamist militants, detained since Friday. Police said Patowari belonged to banned Bangladesh militant outfit, Ansarullah Bangla Team (ABT). “He admitted he himself hacked publisher Tutul three times during the attack,” said Monirul Islam, who leads the police’s counter-terrorism unit. Islam told reporters that the arrest of Patowari represented “an important breakthrough” in smashing the leadership of the ABT, a group suspected of carrying out several attacks. Three assailants wielding machetes and meat cleavers attacked Tutul, together with a secular blogger and a poet, at his publishing firm in the capital, leaving them in a pool of blood.

Tutul had published books by a controversial Bangladeshi-American atheist writer Avijit Roy, who was murdered outside a book fair earlier in the year. On the same day Tutul was attacked, another secular publisher was slaughtered at his office near Dhaka University. A group named Ansar al-Islam, which claims to be a Bangladesh branch of Al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent (AQIS), claimed responsibility for both attacks.

However in a new development, police said Thursday that ABT and Ansar al-Islam were the same outfit. “Ansar al-Islam and Ansarullah Bangla Team are the same people,” Dhaka police spokesman Masudur Rahman told AFP. Moreover, officers said that neither ABT nor Ansar al-Islam had any proven link to the international jihadist network Al-Qaeda.

Minorities
Bangladesh is reeling from a wave of killings of religious minorities and secular and liberal activists that have spiked in recent weeks. Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina has vowed to catch “each and every killer” as her government comes under mounting international pressure to end the attacks.

Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina has said the raids are part of an effort to root out Islamic militants blamed for a wave of deadly attacks against atheists and religious minorities, even though the vast majority of those detained are accused of petty crimes and not radicalism.

The raids have been criticized as a pretext for intimidating political opponents, with the main opposition party saying thousands of its members were rounded up. Meanwhile, a Hindu college lecturer was seriously wounded after being hacked by three men in Bangladesh Wednesday, police said, in an attack that resembles a recent spate of brutal assaults on religious minorities. Ripon Chakrabarti, 50, a mathematics lecturer, cried out as he was attacked at the door of his home in the southern town of Madripur at around 5:00 pm, leading locals to catch one of the assailants, police said.

It comes amid a week-long police crackdown on militant groups in Muslim-majority Bangladesh in the wake of recent violence by suspected Islamists, with more than 11,000 people arrested since Friday. “He was hacked in his head, neck and shoulders. He has been sent to a big hospital in the nearby city of Barisal after his condition deteriorated,” police inspector Kamrul Ahsan told AFP.

Police were questioning the alleged attacker for clues as to the motive, he said, adding that he is a college student who hails from the northeast of the country. “So far, he has not said anything on why they attacked the lecturer,” Ahsan said. However, the latest attack appeared to bear the hallmarks of recent attacks on minorities and secular activists by suspected Islamist militants.

Nearly 50 people have been killed over the last three years in a wave of gruesome murders targeting Hindus, Christians, Sufi Muslims, secular activists and foreigners, with most blamed on or claimed by Islamist militants.

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