B’desh Prof Murder: Police Detains a Student from Rajshahi Univ

Rejecting reports of ISIS’ involvement, the police said ISIS did not have any organisational existence in Bangladesh.

Rezaul Karim Siddiquee. (Photo Courtesy: Facebook page of Rezaul Karim Siddiquee)

A student activist of an Islamist group was detained on Sunday in connection with the brutal killing of a secular Bangladeshi university professor, a day after ISIS claimed responsibility for the latest such attack on intellectuals and bloggers in the Muslim-majority country.

Hafizur Rahman, 21, was detained in connection with the murder of 58-year-old Professor of English, from Rajshashi University, AFM Rezaul Karim Siddiquee in Rajshahi in northwestern Bangladesh.

We detained for interrogation a student of the university suspecting his links to Professor Karim’s murder. He is a second year student of the Public Administration department of the university.

<b>Shahadat Hossain, Officer in-charge</b>

Rajshahi’s police commissioner Mohammad Shamsuddin said that they have started interrogating the detainee, who was an activist of fundamentalist Jamaat-e- Islam’s student wing Islamic Chhatra Shibir.

Meanwhile, the police rejected reports of ISIS involvement in the horrific crime. The US-based SITE Intelligence Group had on Saturday reported that the dreaded terrorist group hacked the professor to death over his “calls to atheism”.

Calling such reports “unauthenticated”, a police spokesperson said ISIS did not have any organisational existence in Bangladesh.

The murder case was handed over to the Detective Branch of Police after protests mounted over the murder with students of the university suspending classes and exams, demanding police action to track down the killers.

The professor was brutally murdered in the city’s Shalbagan area on Saturday in an attack that police say bears the hallmark of the previous blogger killings.