Faisal Arefin Dipan, owner-publisher of Jagriti Publications, was hacked to death in Dhaka, Bangladesh. The killing took place in Dhaka’s Shahbag area within hours of an attack on another publisher and blogger, at Lalmatia in the capital city on Saturday afternoon. The deceased was the son of a noted professor of Bangla at Dhaka University, Abul Kashem Fazlul Huq.
The blood-stained body of Faisal was found inside his office at Aziz Supermarket, Shahbagh just after news came through of further attacks on three others including publisher and blogger Ahmed Rashid Tutul in another part of Dhaka city.
Faisal’s father said his son had been with him until 1:30pm that afternoon and had left home for his publishing house in Shahbagh. Phoning, and not getting through to his son, the father then went to the office and found it locked and got in touch with his son’s wife and that was when he got the news of other’s deaths, that assailants had hacked three other people, including the owner of Shuddhashwar, publisher Ahmed Rashid Tutul at block-C of Lalmatia in the city. The anxious father rushed to the office again and broke open the door and found his son lying on the floor. “I saw him lying upside down and in a massive pool of blood.. They slaughtered him by cutting his neck. He was dead,” Faisal’s father said.
“My son published the books of Avijit Roy. These people also attacked other publishers of Roy’s works but only my son died,” Fazlul Huq added.
Avijit Roy was a US citizen originally from of Bangladeshi and was a critic of radical Islam. He was murdered last February by suspected fundamentalist Islamists. His wife and fellow blogger Bonya Ahmed was badly injured in the attack. Since then three other bloggers have been killed.
Bangladesh has long been known as a country whose citizens hold to a moderate form of Islam and the country has a secular government. Roy was an advocate of free expression in Bangladesh, coordinating international protests against government censorship and imprisonment of atheist bloggers.
