A university professor on his way to work in northwestern Bangladesh was hacked to death on Saturday in an attack similar to other killings by suspected Muslim militants, police said.
Professor A.F.M. Rezaul Karim Siddique was attacked on the way to the state-run university in Rajshahi city, where he taught English, deputy police commissioner Nahidul Islam said.
The attackers used sharp weapons and fled the scene immediately after, Islam said.
The attack was similar to recent killings of atheist bloggers in Bangladesh by radical militants.
No groups have claimed responsibility for the attack and police are investigating.
His brother Sajidul Karim Siddique said the professor was a “very quiet and simple man”, focused on studying and teaching. He led a cultural group and used to edit a literary magazine.
“So far as we know, he did not have any known enemies and we never found him worried,” he said. “We don't know why it happened to him.”
Over the past year, several people including atheist writers and publishers have been killed allegedly by Islamist groups.
Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina's government has been cracking down on militant groups, which it blames for the deadly attacks last year on secular bloggers, minority Shias, Christians and two foreigners.
The government has accused the opposition of supporting religious radicals in seeking to retaliate against the government for prosecuting suspected war crimes during the 1971 war against Pakistan.
Some of the attacks were claimed by the militant Islamic State (IS) group, but the government dismisses those claims and says the Sunni extremist group has no presence in Bangladesh.
At least three other professors at Rajshahi University have been killed in recent years allegedly by Islamist groups.
A sociology department teacher, AKM Shafiul Islam, was killed in a similar attack on November 15, 2014. A local Islamist group had claimed the responsibility of the murder at that time.
But police investigation, later, could not find any involvement of the Islamists. Rather the investigators said the murder was a sequel of personal enmity.
Fear rises after five secularist bloggers and one publisher were killed by suspected Islamist militants in Bangladesh since last year. Two foreign nationals and two priests were also murdered by the suspected Islamists last year.
On April 6, 2016 – Nazimuddin Samad, 26, a law student and online activist described by his friends as a critic of religious extremism, was killed by unidentified machete-wielding assailants in Dhaka.
Faysal Arfin Deepon, whose firm Jagriti had published the work of Avijit Roy, was stabbed to death in his office on October 31, 2015.
Fellow publisher Ahmedur Rashid Tutul and two writers were injured in an earlier attack at his office in Dhaka’s Lalmatia area on the same day.
The suspected Islamist entered the apartment of blogger Niladri Chattapadhay and chopped him to death on August 7, 2015 at his home in Dhaka’s Khilgaon area.
On May 12, 2015, science writer and blogger Ananta Bijoy Das was killed in the north-eastern city of Sylhet.
The assailants chopped Oyeshekur Rahman Babu, an atheist writer, to death in Dhaka’s Tejgaon area after he criticized Islam. Two attackers were captured red handed and produced before the police.
On February 26, 2015, Bangladeshi-born US writer Avijit Roy, founder of the secular blog site Muktomona, was hacked to death as he was leaving a university book fair in Dhaka. Her wife Rafida Ahmed was survived the attacks.
