The students of Jagannath University block road in front of the campus on Thursday protesting the murder of one their fellows.
The students of Jagannath University on Thursday threatened to call strike for indefinite period from Sunday if the law enforcers fail to arrest the killer of one of their fellows Md Nazimuddin Samad.
During the demonstration the students’ leader Mehrab Azad said they would go for strike from April 10 for indefinite period, if the government fails to arrest the killers.
Earlier the protesters brought out processions on the campus since morning and laid siege to the office of the vice-chancellor for an hour.
Later, a huge procession paraded the city street in front of the campus and blocked road by setting fire and demanded arrest and trial of the perpetrators.
Progressive Students Alliance, an alliance of left-leaning student organisations, also expressed their solidarity with the movement.
Nazimuddin Samad, 26, a master’s student of law department, who posted against Islamism on his Facebook page has been murdered, police said Thursday, the latest in a series of killings of secular activists and bloggers in the country, Agence France-Presse reports.
‘At least four assailants hacked on Nazimuddin Samad’s head with a machete on Wednesday night. As he fell down, one of them shot him with a pistol from close range. He died on the spot,’ deputy commissioner of Dhaka Metropolitan Police Syed Nurul Islam told AFP.
‘It is a case of targeted killing. But no group has claimed responsibility,’ Islam said, adding police were investigating if Samad was murdered for his writing.
The assailants shouted Allahu Akbar (God is Greatest) as they attacked Samad on a busy road in Sutrapur near Dhaka’s Jagannath University.
Samad had only recently arrived in Dhaka from the northeastern city of Sylhet to study law.
Deputy commissioner Islam said police suspect the attackers had been monitoring the victim since before he arrived in Dhaka.
Last year, suspected Islamist militants hacked to death at least four atheist bloggers and a secular publisher in a long-running series of targeting killings of anti-Islam activists in the Muslim majority country.
Police arrested members of a banned group called the Ansarullah Bangla Team over those murders, although none have yet been prosecuted.
Imran Sarker, who leads Bangladesh’s largest online secular activist group, said Samad had joined nationwide protests in 2013 against top Islamist leaders accused of committing war crimes during the country’s war of independence.
‘He was a secular online activist and a loud voice against any social injustice. He was against Islamic fundamentalism,’ said Sarker, head of the Bangladesh Bloggers Association.
Samad had written against radical Islam in a number of recent Facebook postings.
Source: New Age
