Hindu ashram worker hacked to death by machete-wielding attackers in B’desh

Nityaranjan Pandey, 60, who was working as a volunteer for the past 40 years at the Thakur Anukul Chandra Satsanga Paramtirtha Hemayetpurdham Ashram, was murdered this morning in Pabna’s Hemayetpur Upazila. Pandey was taking his routine morning walk when several machete-wielding attackers hacked him in the neck, killing him on the spot only 200 yards away from the ashram, Pabna’s police superintendent Alamgir Kabir said.

It appears, he said, the same group which carried out the recent clandestine attacks on secular and liberal activists and religious minorities killed Pandey. Residents in the neighbourhood said the killers hit him on the head and neck with machetes and fled the scene.

“He was the most devoted worker of our ashram...to our understanding he never developed personal enmity with anyone during his stay here for the past three decades,” a member of the monastery’s managing committee told newsmen at the scene. The monastery, named after a famous Hindu saint, draws large number of Hindu devotees from across Bangladesh and neighbouring India.

Pandey’s murder comes within a week of killings of a Hindu priest, a Christian grocer and wife of an anti-terror police officer. There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the murder. The ISIS and al-Qaeda in Indian Peninsula have claimed responsibility for some of the recent attacks although the government denies their presence in Bangladesh.

The latest attack came just hours after police said they launched a nationwide anti-militancy week-long crackdown also engaging elite anti-crime Rapid Action Battalion and paramilitary Border Guard Bangladesh.