Blogger’s murder: Dhaka arrests chief suspect

'He is a fundamentalist blogger,' the spokesperson RAB says

DHAKA:

Bangladesh authorities announced they had arrested a militant on Monday over last week's machete murder of an atheist American blogger, accusing him of being behind earlier death threats on social media.

A spokesman for the elite Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) said Farabi Shafiur Rahmn had been arrested at a bus station in the capital Dhaka over the gruesome killing of Avijit Roy, describing him as the prime suspect in a crime that triggered international outrage.

“He is the main suspect,” RAB spokesman Major Maksudul Alam told AFP.

“He is a fundamentalist blogger,” the spokesman said, adding that according to “primary information” Farabi had threatened Roy through Twitter and Facebook.

“(Roy’s) family told us that he got threats from Farabi several times,” he added. The American, who earned fame for his blog pieces and for authoring a series of books including the best-selling “The Virus of the Faith”, was hacked to death with a machete in downtown Dhaka last Thursday.

Roy and his blogger wife, who was also badly injured in the attack, had been returning from a book fair when they were both hauled off their rickshaw by two assailants who then slashed them with the machetes.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 3^rd, 2015.