4 booked in Bangladesh blogger hacking case

Niloy Chakrabarty Neel was killed yesterday by assailants inside his fifth-floor flat in the capital Dhaka where he lived with his family

A murder case has been filed against four suspected Islamist militants in connection with the brutal killing of a secular Bangladeshi blogger who was hacked to death after the assailants entered his flat here posing as potential tenants.

Niloy Chakrabarty Neel, 40, popularly known by his pen name Niloy Neel, was killed yesterday by assailants inside his fifth-floor flat in the capital Dhaka where he lived with his family.

Neel's wife Asha Moni filed the case with Khilgaon Police Station late last night, Zahidur Rahman, sub-inspector of the police station, said, adding no arrests have been made so far.

Ansar-Al-Islam, Bangladesh chapter of al-Qaeda in the Indian Sub-Continent, claimed responsibility for the killing terming him an enemy of Allah.

The blogger had recently received numerous threats for his writings and stance against radicalism.

Neel was an activist of a platform -- the Ganajagaran Mancha which waged a massive campaign for the capital punishment for war criminals who carried out atrocities siding with the Pakistani troops in 1971.

Police said Neel's murder right after Friday prayers was a planned one.

Neel's murder is the fourth such brutal murder in the country. Machete-wielding masked men in May hacked to death 33-year-old Ananta Bijoy Das, a secular blogger, in Sylhet city.

Assailants in February had killed 45-year old Avijit Roy, a Bangladesh-born US national, here while his wife narrowly escaped the attack.

A month after Roy's killing, another blogger Washiqur Rahman was murdered in similar fashion in Dhaka but people in the neighbourhood nabbed two suspected killers from the scene and handed them over to police.