Bangladeshi police said on Tuesday they suspect a domestic militant group of being behind the brutal murder of a secular activist in Dhaka, days after a branch of Al-Qaeda claimed responsibility.
Nazimuddin Samad, a law student who criticised Islamism in Facebook posts, was killed last week near his university in the capital by attackers carrying machetes, the latest in a string of deadly assaults on secular activists.
Ansar al-Islam, a Bangladesh branch of al Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent (AQIS), said on Friday it was behind the 26-year-old’s murder, according to the US monitoring group SITE.
But Dhaka Metropolitan Police officers said they believe it was the work of Ansarullah Bangla Team (ABT), a homegrown militant outfit that has been blamed in similar cases.
“We suspect Ansarullah Bangla Team has carried out the murder,” Maruf Hossain Sorder, a spokesperson for the force, told AFP. “There were some similarities between the latest murder and the previous killings of bloggers,” he added.
Bangladesh authorities have consistently denied that international extremist networks such as al Qaeda or the Islamic State group are active in the country. “Al Qaeda or IS (Islamic State) do not exist in Bangladesh,” Sorder said.
Samad was the seventh secular activist — the sixth in the past 15 months — to have been murdered by suspected religious militants over their writings.
