A banner bearing the image of Faisal Dipan hangs from the front of closed shops at the Aziz Market in Dhaka’s Shahbagh district yesterday.

Agencies
Dhaka


Angry publishers burnt books and closed their businesses in Bangladesh yesterday, in the third day of protests over the latest gruesome attacks on secular writers and publishers by suspected hardline Islamists.
Hundreds of people, including book-shop owners, took to the streets of Dhaka to protest perceived government inaction over a string of attacks including the machete murder on Saturday of a publisher of secular books.
“This is not an isolated incident. They first started killing authors, then the bloggers and now they’ve targeted the publishers,” Mustafa Selim, head of the Bangladesh Creative Publishers Society, told reporters.
Rallies were also held in other cities and towns to demand more protection for publishers, bloggers and writers, some of whom have fled the country or gone into hiding, rally organisers said in a statement.
Fears of Islamist violence have been rising in Bangladesh after four atheist bloggers were murdered this year, also by machete-wielding attackers.
Bangladesh has also been rocked by the recent murders of an Italian aid worker and a Japanese farmer, while Dhaka’s main Shiite shrine was bombed last month, killing two people and wounding dozens.
After staging protests on Saturday night and Sunday, secular activists including hundreds of teachers, writers and students also resumed their rallies at Dhaka University, the nation’s main secular bastion.
“The murderers should be caught as soon as possible. There must be an end to this nightmare,” publisher Farid Ahmed, who received a death threat in a text message on Sunday, told AFP.
On Saturday, a gang of suspected Islamists armed with machetes and cleavers hacked to death Faisal Arefin Dipan in his publishing office in the capital.
Two secular bloggers and another publisher were also badly injured in a similar and separate attack hours earlier, leaving them lying in pools of blood in their Dhaka office.
Al-Qaeda in the Indian Sub-continent (AQIS) claimed responsibility for the attacks, calling the victims “atheists and blasphemers”.
The group, which claims to be behind the previous killings, also threatened to murder more writers and publishers who defamed Islam.
Police say they are sceptical of the AQIS claim of responsibility and suspect a banned local Islamist outfit is behind all of them.
Both of the publishers targeted on Saturday put out books by Avijit Roy, a US-born atheist writer of Bangladeshi origin, who was hacked to death in February.
Slain publisher Faisal Arefin Dipan’s wife and injured publisher Ahmedur Rashid Chowdhury Tutul filed two cases yesterday against some unidentified people, though Dipan’s father earlier said they would not file any case in this connection.
Dipan’s wife Dr Razia Rahman filed the case with Shahbagh Police Station in the afternoon, said its officer-in-charge (OC) AB Siddique.
After the murder, Dipan’s father proffesor Abul Kashem Fazlul Haque of Dhaka University said he would not file any case over the killing of his son.
“Many people have asked me to file a case over my son’s murder but I know I won’t get justice. I’ll probably file a case as a rule, and that doesn’t mean I depend on it…I want good sense to prevail,” he said after Dipan’s namaz-e-janaza on Sunday.
Meanwhile, publisher Ahmedur Rashid Chowdhury Tutul lodged a case for attempted murder with police over Saturday’s attack in his office that left him and two others injured.
A relative of Tutul submitted the case document on behalf of him to a police station yesterday afternoon, deputy commissioner Biplob Kumar Sarkar told newsmen.
Unknown assailants barged into the office of publishing house ‘Suddhaswar’ at around 2:30pm on Saturday.
They hacked Tutul, writer Ranadipam Basu and blogger Tarek Rahim with sharp weapons.
The three are being treated at Dhaka Medical College Hospital (DMCH).
DMCH authorities said Tutul and Basu were improving, but Tarek’s was “critical”.
Barely three hours after the attack, publisher Faisal Arefin Dipan was found murdered at Shahbagh. Dipan, who ran publishing house ‘Jagriti Prokashony’, was hacked to death in his office at the Aziz Supermarket— a hub for writers and publishers in Dhaka.
Police are yet to make any breakthrough but suspect militant outfit Ansar Bangla.