A Bangladeshi blogger who spoke out against radical Islam and was a proclaimed atheist was killed Friday, hacked to death with a machete in his apartment.
Niloy Chowdhury, who blogged as Niloy Neel, was the fourth secular blogger in Bangladesh to be
murdered this year, the New York Daily News said, and it is suspected that militant Islamic groups are behind the attacks.
In the previous attacks, al-Qaida and another relatively unknown group Ansar Bangla 7 took responsibility for the killings, but no one has stepped forward
regarding Chowdhury’s death, the Hindustan Times reported.
However, a
tweet Friday morning, which was linked to the Bengali Tribune website, said Ansar al-Islam, an al-Qaida group in India, has claimed responsibility:
Friends went on Chowdhury’s Facebook page to express their outrage and sorrow, the Times said. One wrote, “You won’t be forgotten,” while another said, “Dada [brother], I can’t believe you are no more.”
The BBC reported that all four of the dead bloggers were on a list of 84 “atheist bloggers” that was compiled by Islamic groups in 2013.
“It was originally submitted to the government with the aim of having the bloggers arrested and tried for blasphemy,” editor Mukul Devichand wrote in an analysis for the BBC. “The groups which wanted bloggers arrested told us they have no knowledge of who is behind the killings. There is also a more complex backdrop to the killings. Islamic groups label all these bloggers ‘atheists’ — and many did indeed use the Internet to criticize those who believe in God. But in fact, not all the bloggers were atheists. What they did have in common was they were part of a wider, secular movement that took to the streets in protest in 2013.”
© 2025 Newsmax. All rights reserved.