{Police say the pattern of the attack fitted with previous killings of secular and liberal activists in the country.}<\/p>\n
Unidentified attackers have hacked a university professor to death in Bangladesh, police say, adding that the assault bore the hallmarks of previous killings of bloggers and online activists.<\/p>\n
Police said Rezaul Karim Siddique, a 58-year-old English professor, was attacked from behind with machetes as he walked to the bus station on Saturday from his home in the country’s northwestern city of Rajshahi.<\/p>\n
Two or three assailants rode up on a motorcycle and attacked Siddiquee, slitting his throat and hacking him to death, police official Golam Sackline said, adding that an investigation had been launched.<\/p>\n
Al Jazeera’s Maher Sattar, reporting from Dhaka, said it was unclear why Siddique was targeted.<\/p>\n
“The police say that the manner of his murder was very similar to the others and they believe that it is a religiously motivated attack,” he said.<\/p>\n
“His colleagues say that Siddique had never been publicly critical of Islam unlike the seven others who have been murdered in the same way.<\/p>\n
“He had been a cultural activist, not someone who had been critical of religion and his cultural activities were seen as unreligious. He launched a music school in a very conservative village, so the criteria for targeting people appears to have been broadened.<\/p>\n
“There is now concern among liberals as to whether it’s possible to express yourself and your beliefs any more with the same freedom that they had in the past.”<\/p>\n
Teachers and students at Rajshahi University staged a demonstration on campus after the murder.<\/p>\n
Homegrown assailants have been blamed for a number of murders of secular bloggers and online activists since 2013, the most recent being in the capital Dhaka early this month.<\/p>\n
Police say that in each of the attacks unidentified assailants hacked the victim to death with machetes or cleavers.<\/p>\n
Eight members of banned Ansarullah Bangla Team, including a top cleric who is said to have founded the group, were convicted late last year for the murder of atheist blogger Ahmed Rajib Haider in February 2013.<\/p>\n
The recent killings have sparked outrage at home and abroad, with international rights groups demanding that the secular government protect freedom of speech in the Muslim-majority country.<\/p>\n
Ansar al-Islam, a Bangladesh branch of Al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent, this month claimed responsibility for the murder of 26-year-old Nazimuddin Samad, a law student who was killed on the streets of Dhaka, according to US monitoring group SITE.<\/p>\n
Police, however, blamed the Ansarullah for the murder.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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