3 detained for murder of Hindu tailor in Bangladesh

Nikhil Chandra Joarder, 50, a resident of the Tangail district, was hacked to death on Saturday by three assailants who entered his house-cum shop and slit his throat, in the latest similar attack in the Muslim-majority country on minorities and secular activists. Three persons, including an activist of key-opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party and a local leader of fundamentalist Jamaat-e-Islami, have been detained in connection with the murder, police said on Sunday. 

“They have been detained for questioning in connection with Nikhil Chandra Joardar’s murder as part of the investigation,” Tangail’s additional superintendent of police Mohammad Aslam Khan said. Hours after the murder, USbased private SITE Intelligence Group posted a statement saying the Islamic State claimed the killing responsibility of the attack. 

ISIS’ Amaq Agency reported the group’s responsibility for killing the Hindu tailor for blasphemy in Tangail district in Bangladesh, it said in a tweet. The local media reports said that Nikhil served three months of imprisonment in 2012 when he was arrested for blasphemous comments. 

Police said the people in the neighbourhood feared he might have drawn the Islamists wrath since the comments were made. “We are trying to track down the killers and called CID (Criminal Investigation Department) to probe the murder,” said Tangail’s district police. 

There have been systematic assaults in Bangladesh in recent months specially targeting minorities, secular bloggers, intellectuals and foreigners. In the recent attacks, a liberal professor was brutally hacked to death last Saturday by machete-wielding ISIS militants who slit his throat near his home in Rajshahi city. Two days later on Monday, Bangladesh’s first gay magazine editor was brutally murdered along with a friend in his flat in Dhaka by Islamists. 

In February, a head priest was killed at a Hindu temple in an area bordering India, the first attack by the ISIS targeting the community. Last year, four prominent secular bloggers were killed with machetes, one inside his own home. 

In most of the cases, Islamic State or al-Qaeda in Indian sub-continent claimed the responsibility. 

Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, however, repeatedly denied existence of any foreign terrorist groups in the country and attributed the deadly attacks on home grown extremists.