Impunity Spotlight: BANGLADESH
Avijit Roy, Freelance
February 26, 2015, in Dhaka, Bangladesh
Two unidentified men approached Roy and his wife, Rafida Ahmed Bonna, as they were leaving a book fair in the Dhaka University campus area, according to Bonna and witnesses, the Dhaka Tribune reported. The assailants stabbed and hacked at them with sharp weapons and fled the scene, news reports said. Roy and Bonna were taken to a local hospital, where Roy was pronounced dead, according to news reports. Bonna was critically wounded.
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Bangladesh is #12 on CPJ’s 2015 Impunity Index, which calculates the number of unsolved journalist murders as a percentage of each country’s population. This month CPJ is highlighting cases from each of the 14 countries on the list ahead of the International Day to End Impunity on November 2.
BANGLADESH
A wave of violence against bloggers has landed Bangladesh back onto the index for the first time since 2011. At least four Bangladeshi bloggers have been hacked to death by apparent Islamic extremists this year alone, and a total of five of Bangladesh’s seven victims of unsolved murders over the last decade are bloggers who criticized religious extremism. Brazen attacks against bloggers like American-Bangladeshi Avijit Roy, who was pulled from a rickshaw by machete-wielding assailants outside a book fair in Dhaka, have been followed by a handful of arrests, but in only one case since 2005, Gautam Das, have the perpetrators been tried and convicted. Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina and the nominally secular ruling Awami League party have done little to speak out for justice in these crimes, allowing political interests to trump rule of law. One colleague told CPJ, “Authorities seem more concerned with what bloggers are writing than going after their killers.” In the wake of this unchecked terror, several bloggers have fled into exile.
IMPUNITY INDEX RATING: 0.044 unsolved journalist murders per million inhabitants
LAST YEAR: Bangladesh was not on the 2014 index