Slain activist Nazimuddin Samad buried in Sylhet

Slain online activist Nazimuddin Samad has been buried at his village home in Sylhet.

The body was handed over to his family from the morgue at the Dhaka Medical College Hospital, where it was kept after an autopsy at Dhaka’s Mitford Hospital on Thursday. 

His cousin ‘Badrul’ took the coffin and arrived at their village home in Biyanibazar’s Bharautha village around 6am Friday. 

He was buried in the family’s graveyard after a Namaz-e-janaza (funeral prayers) at 11am, said Mamun Rashid, another cousin.

The 27-year-old law student from Dhaka’s Jagannath University was attacked by a group of three to four men on Wednesday night while he was walking down a busy street in Old Dhaka. 

He used to stay with a friend in Dhaka’s Gendaria.

The autopsy report is yet to be filed, but mortuary workers said his skull bore a bullet wound on one side and a cut inflicted by a sharp weapon on the other.

In the previous murders of secular writers, bloggers, activists and publishers, too, the attackers had targeted the head to make sure the victims would die.

Samad had opposed religious extremists in his online writings. An activist of the anti-war criminal platform ‘Ganajagaran Mancha’ in Sylhet, he was on radical group Hifazat-e Islam’s list of ‘atheist bloggers’.