Hindu worker hacked to death in Bangladesh

A 62-year-old Hindu monastery worker was hacked to death in Bangladesh on Friday, the police said, the latest in a series of such attacks on religious minorities in the mainly Muslim country.

The latest murder came as the Bangladeshi police announced a special week-long crackdown on militants as they ramp up efforts to stem the killings, with five members of a banned Islamist outfit killed in gunbattles with officers in the past three days.

Nityaranjan Pande was taking his regular early morning walk when unidentified attackers set upon him, killing him on the spot, the police said.

“As a diabetic, everyday he walks early in the morning. Today as he was walking, several attackers hacked him in the neck. He died on the spot,” the local police station chief Abdullah Al-Hasan told AFP.

“He had been working at the monastery for around 40 years. In recent years he was the head of its office staff,” he said.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack.

But the head of police in the north-western district of Pabna, where the Shri Shri Thakur Anukulchandra Ashram is located, said the killing bore the hallmarks of recent attacks by Islamist extremists on minorities and secular activists.

“There was no eye-witness to the attack as it happened very early in the morning,” Alamgir Kabir told AFP.

Bangladesh is reeling from a wave of murders of secular and liberal activists and religious minorities that have left nearly 50 people dead in the last three years.

The murders have spiked in recent weeks with a gruesome wave of killings that has spanned from the capital Dhaka to remote parts of the north and coastal south.

In the past week alone, an elderly Hindu priest was found nearly decapitated in a rice field, a Christian grocer was hacked to death near a church while the wife of an anti-terrorism officer was stabbed and shot. Her husband had led several high-profile operations against the banned Jamayetul Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB), an Islamist militant group, in the south-eastern city of Chittagong.

Most of the latest attacks have been claimed either by the Islamic State group or by a South Asian branch of Al-Qaeda. PM Sheikh Hasina’s government has however blamed homegrown Islamists for the attacks.