Dhaka: Shops and households owned by Hindus were vandalised in northwestern Rangpur in Bangladesh on Saturday.
A Muslim spiritual leader was also hacked to death by a mob for allegedly insulting Islam in western Kushtia, as reported by PTI.
The attack in Rangpur, about 300-odd kms northwest of Dhaka, took place after the death of a Muslim youth in the neighbourhood. The Hindus had nothing to do with the death though.
According to the police, a “third party” carried out the vandalism to divert the case and police’s attention from the overnight murder of a person named Rakib Hassan.
More than a hundred members of the Hindu community live in the Daspara market area where Hassan was allegedly murdered by drug peddler Mohammad Momin over a previous dispute, Prothom Alo reported.
Momin’s house was found vacant as he went into hiding while his family members feared retaliatory attacks, the newspaper said.
The attack on the Hindus took place even when the deceased youth’s family said members of the community had nothing to do with his murder.
“We have no issues with them (Hindus),” Hassan’s mother Nur Jahan Begum told reporters.
“We are tracking down the real killers. We have also identified those who vandalised the Hindu households and shops,” Rangpur’s police commissioner Mohammad Majid Ali said.
Attacks on minorities in Bangladesh are continuing even after the new government took over in February. There have been 133 incidents of communal violence between January 1 and March 31 this year, the Bangladesh Hindu Buddhist Christian Unity Council had said on April 9.
In the second incident in Kushtia, a group of assailants killed school teacher and spiritual figure Shamim Reza Jahangir and critically wounded at least seven of his followers and set on fire his sanctuary or ‘darbar’ over allegations of insulting Islam, the police said. This happened about 200 kms west of Dhaka.
“The local miscreants killed Jahangir. His body is being sent to Kushtia General Hospital morgue for an autopsy,” officer-in-charge of Kushtia’s Daulatpur police station Arifur Rahman told reporters.
Officials said armed police and elite anti-crime Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) forces were sent to the scene to prevent further violence.
Jahangir was arrested in May 2021 after hard-line Islamists alleged that he was carrying out “controversial activities”, local journalists said. He was released on the basis of a court order after a brief detention.
