Mancha calls half-day shutdown in Sylhet protesting blogger Ananta’s killing

Secular movement Ganajagaran Mancha’s Sylhet unit has called a half-day shutdown in the district protesting against the killing of its activist, blogger Ananta Bijoy Das.

Staff Correspondentand Sylhet Correspondentbdnews24.com
Published : 12 May 2015, 10:15 AM
Updated : 12 May 2015, 10:56 AM

Mancha’s local unit chief Debashish Debu announced the protest programme minutes after the killing on Tuesday.

Several machete-wielding men hacked 30-year-old Das to death in the morning when he was going to the city.

Das used to write on ‘Mukto-mona’ (free thinkers), a blog site propagating rationalism and opposing fundamentalism, that was started by Avijit Roy who was killed in a similar attack in February in Dhaka.

“We’ll observe an eight-hour strike in Sylhet [on Tuesday] from 6am,” Debu announced.

Another blog activist Oyashiqur Rahman, who was killed in similar fashion in Dhaka in March, was also a Mancha activist.

The Mancha, pressing for banning Islamist parties and maximum penalty for war crimes convicts, took out a procession in Dhaka on Tuesday.

It blamed the government’s “failure” for the killings.

“The latest killing proves the government’s indifference and failure to tackle militancy and terrorism,” Mancha spokesperson Imran H Sarkar said in a statement.

“Such attacks on free-thinkers are results of the government’s failure.”

Police suspect extremists for the killing of bloggers, all of whom were hacked to death.

Earlier this month, al-Qaeda's Indian offshoot claimed responsibilities for the killings of secular bloggers in Bangladesh it dubbed as 'blasphemers'.