Govt responsible for murder of anti-Islamist Avijit: Khoka

Terming the slain writer-blogger Avijit Roy ‘anti-Islamist’, BNP leader Sadeque Hossain Khoka has said the freethinker was killed by the government to get Western support.

Speaking at a rally by the Juba Dal’s US unit at Jackson Heights in New York on Sunday night (local time), Khoka blamed the government for the killing of the freethinker, though his family blames extremists for the murder.

The BNP leader said the government staged the murder to draw people’s attention away from the blockade being enforced by the BNP-Jamaat-e-Islami alliance.

“Avijit was killed to make the Westerners understand that militancy has risen in Bangladesh. So Avijit, an anti-Islamist from the minority group, was targeted,” Khoka said.

Health Minister Mohammed Nasim had said after the murder that Avijit was the first to fall after a conversation between Nagorik Oikya chief Mahmudur Rahman Manna and Khoka over shaking the government by ‘felling some bodies in Dhaka University’.

bdnews24.com broke the news on the leaked audio clips of Manna’s conversations with Khoka and another person last month.

In the phone conversation with an unidentified person, Manna seemed to suggest the need to influence senior generals to take over power and end the current political crisis.

In another conversation with Khoka, now in the US, he said ' a few deaths' during clashes in the Dhaka University could destabilise the government.

Manna was arrested for allegedly trying to incite the army.

Khoka, in his speech in New York, blamed former home minister Nasim for Avijit’s murder. 

He said Nasim had freed identified criminals and extremists after negotiation when Nasim was the home minister.

“He has connections with them as political weapons since then,” Khoka said.