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B’desh arrests main suspect in US blogger murder

Farabi Shafiur Rahman, a self-proclaimed Islamist blogger who had previously threatened Roy multiple times, was arrested by the elite Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) four days after the killing.

Rahman was arrested from a bus stand in Dhaka on Monday, said Commander Mufti Mahmud Khan, director at Legal and Media Wing of RAB.

Rahman has confessed that he had threatened to kill the 42-year-old blogger, Khan said.

Roy, known for his critique of religious extremism, was hacked to death in the university area by machete-wielding assailants who attacked the Bangladeshi-origin writer as he was returning from the book fair with his wife on Thursday.

“Avijit’s father mentioned Rahman’s name as he had threatened to kill his son several times,” Khan told reporters. “A year ago Rahman threatened to kill Avijit Roy, one of the founder moderators of a popular blog Mukto-Mona,” he said.

“Rahman came in touch with Avijit five years back through the social media site, Facebook. They shared their views on the site. They argued over opinions, and Avijit blocked him,” Khan said.

On January 25 last year, Rahman’s Facebook status read, “It’s a holy duty of Bangalee Muslims to kill Avijit.”

Then on February 9, last year, he commented on a Facebook post: “Avijit Roy cannot be killed now. He lives in America.”

This was the second murder of a writer at the February Book Fair scene since the attack on famous Bangladeshi author and Dhaka University professor Humayun Azad who subsequently died of his wounds in Germany.

Militants later also killed another blogger Rajib Haidar in 2013.

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