Author Salman Rushdie has joined fellow Booker Prize winners and celebrated writers like Amitav Ghosh and Margaret Atwood to appeal to Bangladesh government to do “all in its power” to punish the killers of three secular bloggers who were hacked to death recently.
Mr. Ghosh and Neel Mukherjee besides novelist Rohinton Mistry are among the writers, who have called on the Bangladesh government in an appeal through The Guardian “to ensure that the tragic events of the last three months are not repeated, and to bring the perpetrators to justice”.
They have added their names to an open letter that comes days after masked men hacked to death blogger Ananta Bijoy Das in Bangladesh in the third such attack by religious extremists since February.
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Avijit Roy was the first victim of a deadly attack on “atheist bloggers” by extremists when assailants attacked Roy and his wife in February.
A month after Roy’s killing, another blogger Washiqur Rahman was murdered in similar fashion in Dhaka.
“Freedom of expression is a fundamental right under Bangladesh’s Constitution as well as one of the rights under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” the open letter says.
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“We call on the Bangladeshi authorities to swiftly and impartially investigate Ananta Bijoy Das’s death as well as the murders of Avijit Roy and Washiqur Rahman Babu, and ensure that the perpetrators are brought to justice in accordance with international fair trial standards,” it demands.