PM Hasina says ‘covert killings’ work of anti-government campaigners

Those who had killed ordinary people for the sake of their campaigns are responsible for the recent ‘covert killings’, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina has said.

She was speaking at the fourth meeting of the Fast Track Project Monitoring Committee at her office on Wednesday.

The separate killings of a Rajshahi University professor, a gay-rights activist and his friend in Dhaka by machete-wielding assailants on Saturday and Monday follow similar attacks on secular thinkers and members of religious minorities in Bangladesh.

“We do not want to see such events in Bangladesh,” she was quoted having said by her Press Secretary Ihsanul Karim.

“She said the people who killed people for their campaigns were responsible for this.”  

“The prime minister, in the context of the recent killings, said they had been carefully planned. The targets were Imams, Hindu and Christian priests… the motive is to destabilise the country,” he told reporters after the meeting. 

She said a platform that ‘opposes development’ was responsible, and added the culprits would be caught soon.

English Professor Rezaul Karim Siddiquee was hacked to death by assailants, who attacked him while he was about to board a bus to the campus on Saturday.

On Monday afternoon, Xulhaz Mannan, an editor of Bangladesh’s first LGBT magazine ‘Roopbaan’, was hacked to death in his Kolabagan home along with is theatre activist friend Mahbub Rabbi Tonoy.

Al Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent (AQIS) has claimed militants of their unit in Bangladesh, Ansar Al Islam, were behind both the incidents.

But the government has been debunking the claims, saying home-grown terrorists were responsible, not global terror groups.