The victim, who had promoted secularism, was among several writers fatally attacked in the country in 2015.
A special tribunal in eastern Bangladesh announced on Wednesday that four men had been sentenced to death for the 2015 murder of a blogger and writer who had promoted secularism in the Muslim-majority country. The victim, Ananta Bijoy Das,32, a banker by profession who wrote for the platform Free Mind, was among several bloggers and writers fatally attacked that year. He was chased down in the eastern city of Sylhet by four men, who stabbed him to death on a street close to his home and left his body near a pond. “We are happy with the verdict,” Somor Bijoy Shee Shakhor, Mr. Das’s brother-in-law, told The New York Times. “We cannot get Ananta back. The only thing we want is justice.” Just 10 weeks before Mr. Das’s death in May 2015, Avijit Roy, a Bangladeshi-American who was the moderator of Free Mind, had also been killed, by machete-wielding assailants as he was leaving a book fair in Dhaka, the capital.
