Student activist detained over murder of Bangldesh professor

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 Rajshahi University Professor 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,” said officer in charge of Rajshahi’s Boalia police station Shahadat Hossain.

Rajshahi’s police commissioner Mohammad Shamsuddin later said the detainee was an activist of fundamentalist Jamaat-e- Islam’s student wing Islamic Chhatra Shibir and “we have started interrogating him”.

Meanwhile, the police rejected reports of ISIS involvement in the horrific crime. The US-based SITE Intelligence Group has on Saturday reported that the dreaded terror 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.