Unidentified assailants on Thursday hacked a Bangladeshi writer and blogger to death and injured his wife as the couple was returning home from a book fair in central Dhaka, police said according to dpa. Officer Wahid Uz Zaman said the assailants carried out the attacks with sharp weapons on Abhijit Roy, 40, and his Rafida Ahmed, 36, at Dhaka University campus at around 9.30 p.m. (1530 GMT), adding that an investigation had been launched. Roy and Ahmed, who live in the United States and had travelled to Dhaka to attend an unveiling ceremony of his new book at the fair, were rushed to a hospital where doctors declared Roy dead. Ahmed, also a writer, was undergoing treatment at Dhaka Medcical College Hospital. The founder of a well-known blog, Roy wrote on topics including science, society and philosophy in the Muslim-majority South Asian country. He authored a number of controversial books, publisher Ahmed Rashid Tutul told dpa by phone. "Roy became target of the fundamentalists groups when his books hit the stands a few years ago," Tutul added.
