Bangladesh: critics assassinated

Barnabas Fund  |  World
Date posted:  1 Jun 2016
Share Add       
Bangladesh: critics assassinated

Bangladesh’s Prime Minister, Sheikh Hasina| photo: IndiaToday

Since 2013, Bangladesh has been experiencing a series of targeted assassinations of bloggers, journalists and academics, who have been hacked to death with knives and machetes as a result of being perceived to have criticised Islam.

In the latest attacks in April, a professor of English and the editor of a magazine, together with his friend, were brutally murdered by knife-wielding gangs.

Challenging radical Islam

Although these attacks have primarily targeted atheists, the common factor in all of those who have been murdered has been criticism of radical Islam, particularly Bangladesh’s largest Islamist party, the Jamat-i-Islami. The murder of one such victim, a Muslim university lecturer who had stopped his female students from wearing the burqa (a full-length robe including a face covering with only a grill to see through) because he believed it could be used to cheat in exams, was justified by his killers on the grounds that he was a murtad (apostate), for which shari’a requires a compulsory death penalty for adult males.

Share
< Previous article| World| Next article >
Read more articles by Barnabas Fund >>
World
Myanmar: Christians’ food aid 
 runs low amid army blockades

Myanmar: Christians’ food aid runs low amid army blockades

Thousands of ethnic Chin Christians are enduring severe food shortages in Mynanar because government forces have put up road blockades, …

World
Pakistan: weighty evidence

Pakistan: weighty evidence

An ancient marble cross, thought to be as much as 1,200 years old, was discovered in the foothills of the …

About en

Our vision, values and history.

Read more

Subscribe

Enjoy our monthly paper and full online access

Find out more