On Thursday night, assailants attacked Avijit Roy, a U.S. blogger and writer, and his wife, Rafida Ahmed Banna, with meat cleavers on a crowded sidewalk in Dhaka, Bangladesh's capital. Roy died in the hospital, and Banna was seriously injured. Roy, born in Bangladesh but a U.S. citizen, started the website Mukto-mona, or "Free Mind" in Bengali, and his friends and family say he had received threats for his writings about science and against religious extremism.
"He was a free thinker," friend and fellow blogger Baki Billah told Independent TV. "He was a Hindu but he was not only a strong voice against Islamic fanatics but also equally against other religious fanatics." Islamic extremists have been blamed for previous, unsolved attacks against writers in majority-Muslim Bangladesh. Roy was back in his birth country for a few weeks for the launch of his latest book at a local book fair.
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