Al-Qaeda threatens to kill Bangla actors

New York: Statements attributed to a regional division of al Qaeda late on Monday claimed responsibility for attacks on two publishers in Bangladesh who put out works critical of fundamentalist Islam, according to the SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors radical Islamic propaganda.

The two men were stabbed, one fatally, eight months after a similar attack on Avijit Roy, a Bangladeshi-American known for his critical writings on religious extremism, the police said. Both publishing houses had issued Mr. Roy’s works.

One of the publishers, Faisal Arefin Dipan, died of his wounds immediately, the police said. The other, Ahmed Rahim Tutul, was in critical condition. The claim of responsibility by the division, al Qaeda was made in statements posted on Twitter. One of them said the two men were “worse than the writers of such books, as they helped propagate these books and paid the blasphemers handsome amounts of money for writing them.”

A second statement, titled “Who’s Next,” describes categories of people as “our next targets,” The New York Times said.

The list includes writers, poets, intellectuals, newspaper or magazine editors, reporters and actors. The statements will feed into a debate over whether transnational terrorism groups have an organisational presence in Bangladesh, and they follow three similar statements that said the IS had carried out attacks on foreigners and Shiite Muslims.

Bangladesh’s prime minister, Sheikh Hasina, has been adamant that the rise in targeted violence is emanating from political opposition figures in Bangladesh, and the police have named or arrested suspects with links to two main opposition groups, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party and Jamaat-e-Islami, an allied Islamist party.