Via Gatestone:

A third brilliant blogger has been hacked to death in Bangladesh since February. On May 9, Ananta Bijoy Das, a banker by profession, and a blogger, was murdered, apparently by Islamist extremists.

Das was murdered in broad daylight on a busy street in the country’s fifth largest city, Sylhet. He had written for Mukto-Mona (Free Mind), a website with which the Bangladeshi-American blogger, Abhijit Roy, had worked before being hacked to death himself in February by machete-wielding assailants.

Five weeks after Roy’s death, yet another blogger, Oyasiqur Rahman, was also brutally murdered by three men in Dhaka.

Their deaths echoed the murder of Ahmed Rajib Haider on February 15, 2013, and the stabbing in Bangladesh of Asif Mahiuddin in January 2013.

Ansarullah Bangla Team, one of the Islamist groups operating in Bangladesh, claimed all three killings of recent months. The group, also known as Ansar Bangla 8, tweeted within hours of Das’s murder: “Alhamdulillah [Arabic for ‘praise God’], all the brothers of Operation team are safe.” An hour later, the group said that Al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent (AQIS) claimed responsibility for killing Das. Detectives suspect that the Ansarullah Bangla team maintains contact with Al-Qaeda. […]

In 2014, when Asian and African Muslims were asked in a Pew survey whether suicide bombing or other forms of violence against civilian targets could be justified to defend Islam from an enemy, 47% percent of Bangladeshi Muslims said yes. They represented the highest number, after Gaza (62%). The number of those who those justified suicide bombings and other violence is far higher than those in Malaysia (18%), Indonesia (9%) and Pakistan (3%).