Between 2013 and 2016, a series of bloggers and a publisher were hacked to death in Dhaka and Sylhet by men who had, in most cases, never read a word they wrote. The killings followed a pattern set years earlier: a name on a list, a machete, and a state slow to act.
Avijit Roy had just left the Ekushey Book Fair on the campus of Dhaka University when the two men stepped out of the crowd. It was the evening of February 26, 2015, and Roy, a Bangladeshi American engineer who had built the freethinker blog Mukto-Mona into one of the most widely read secular platforms in the Bengali language, was riding a bicycle rickshaw with his wife, Rafida Bonya Ahmed, when the assailants pulled them both to the ground near the Teacher-Student Centre intersection and began swinging machetes. Roy was struck repeatedly in the head. Ahmed lost the fingers of her left hand trying to shield him. He was pronounced dead roughly two hours later at Dhaka Medical College Hospital. She later said police officers had been standing nearby and did nothing.
Roy's murder was not an isolated act. It was the fourth in a string of killings that had begun two years earlier and would continue for two more, a campaign carried out by Islamist militants against a specific, identifiable class of people: Bangladeshi writers who used blogs and small magazines to argue for secularism, science, and religious skepticism in a country where such arguments could get a person killed.
The first to die was Ahmed Rajib Haider, a 30 year old architect who blogged under the pseudonym Thaba Baba and had been prominent in the Shahbag movement, the 2013 protests demanding capital punishment for war crimes committed during Bangladesh's 1971 independence war. Haider was hacked to death with machetes near his home in Mirpur, Dhaka, on February 15, 2013. Five students from North South University were arrested within weeks and later confessed to a magistrate. A tribunal eventually convicted several of them: Md Faisal Bin Nayem, who wielded the cleaver, was sentenced to death, along with an accomplice tried in absentia; a third received life imprisonment; and Mufti Jasimuddin Rahmani, the spiritual leader of the banned militant group Ansarullah Bangla Team, received five years for incitement.
The killings that followed shared a signature. On March 30, 2015, Washiqur Rahman was attacked with meat cleavers in Dhaka's Tejgaon neighborhood; his assailants, caught at the scene with help from bystanders, turned out to be madrasa students who told police they had received fifteen days of militant training and had never actually read anything Rahman had written. On May 12, 2015, four masked men hacked Ananta Bijoy Das to death in Sylhet; he edited a small rationalist quarterly called Jukti, or Logic, and had recently been denied a Swedish visa to speak about the persecution of writers like himself, on the grounds that officials feared he would not return home. On August 7, 2015, a gang broke into the Dhaka apartment of Niloy Chatterjee, who wrote under the name Niloy Neel, and killed him with machetes after he had gone to police seeking protection and been turned away.
Roy's killing in February 2015 drew international attention chiefly because he held American citizenship and had built an international following. A militant faction calling itself Ansar Bangla-7 claimed responsibility on Twitter within a day; the Bangladesh branch of al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent claimed it more formally months later. A Bangladeshi blogger named Shafiur Rahman Farabi, who had publicly threatened Roy online before the murder, was arrested within days and eventually convicted; a British citizen, Touhidur Rahman, was later described by police as the plot's chief planner.
It took six years for a court to reach a verdict in Roy's case. On February 16, 2021, the Anti-Terrorism Special Tribunal in Dhaka, under Judge Md Majibur Rahman, sentenced five members of the militant group Ansar al-Islam to death and gave Farabi a life sentence. "Blogger Avijit Roy lost his life because he wanted to write and express himself," the judge said in his ruling. The prosecutor put it more bluntly: the defendants' goal, he told the court, had been "to kill bloggers, writers and publishers to stop freedom of speech."
Rights groups welcomed the convictions while objecting, as a matter of principle, to the death sentences themselves. Aliya Iftikhar of the Committee to Protect Journalists said the ruling showed that impunity had "long perpetuated a cycle of violence and fear in Bangladesh," even as her organization urged Dhaka to commute the sentences on appeal. Two of the five men convicted in absentia were never in custody to begin with, having fled the country years earlier; whether they will ever face the sentence handed down against them remains an open question.
Underneath the individual verdicts sits a harder fact. According to a 2014 accounting later cited by rights monitors, a group calling itself Defenders of Islam had circulated a list of eighty four Bangladeshis, most of them secular writers, marked for death; by the time the list surfaced publicly, nine of the people on it had already been killed. Bangladesh's own government, rather than moving decisively to protect the people named, spent the same period arresting several of the bloggers themselves. In April 2013, four writers, including Asif Mohiuddin, who had survived a near fatal stabbing months earlier, were detained by the Detective Branch on charges of "instigating negative elements against Islam." Brad Adams, then Asia director at Human Rights Watch, said at the time that "by targeting peaceful critics in the media and blogosphere and promising more arrests, the government is abandoning any serious claim that it is committed to free speech."
Investigators identified the killers of a half dozen writers, one by one, over the better part of a decade. In the same period, the government that failed to stop them found time to arrest some of the intended victims instead.
Some of those targeted chose exile over silence. Ahmedur Rashid Chowdhury, who nearly died in the October 2015 attack on his office, was invited to Norway by the International Cities of Refuge Network and has continued publishing his magazine, Shuddhashar, from there ever since; in 2016, the novelist Margaret Atwood selected him for PEN's Pinter Prize for an International Writer of Courage. Roy's widow, Bonya Ahmed, has continued to write and speak publicly from the United States about the attack that killed her husband and nearly took her own life.
The killings did not stop with the six names most closely associated with the campaign. Nazimuddin Samad, a law student, was murdered in April 2016; two university professors and two editors of an LGBT magazine, Xulhaz Mannan and Mahbub Rabbi Tonoy, were killed within weeks of each other that same spring. Militant groups operating under a shifting set of names, Ansarullah Bangla Team, later rebranded as Ansar al-Islam, claimed most of them, framing each killing as punishment for apostasy.
What connects the cases is less the ideology of the killers, which was consistent and explicit, than the arithmetic of consequence. A handful of low-level operatives have been sentenced to death in absentia or in custody. The men who financed, organized, and inspired the campaign have, for the most part, not been. And the writers who might have kept working in Bangladesh have, with rare exceptions, either fled the country or stopped writing under their own names at all.