Mob attacks Hindu households, businesses in Bangladesh

Dhaka, Apr 11 (PTI) A Muslim spiritual leader was hacked to death for allegedly insulting Islam while shops and households owned by Hindus were vandalised in two separate mob attacks in western Kushtia and northwestern Rangpur in Bangladesh on Saturday. An irate mob attacked several Hindu households and businesses in pre-dawn hours over the death of a Muslim youth in their neighbourhood in Rangpur, about 300-odd kms northwest of Dhaka. A “third party” carried out the vandalism to divert the case and police’s attention from the overnight murder of a person named Rakib Hassan, police claimed. Prothom Alo newspaper said more than a hundred members of the Hindu community live in the Daspara market area where Hassan was murdered allegedly by drug peddler Mohammad Momin over a previous dispute. Reporters found Momin’s house vacant as he went into hiding while his family members feared retaliatory attacks, the newspaper said. Police said the attack took place even when the deceased youth’s family said the Hindu community had nothing to do with his murder. “We have no issues with them (Hindus),” Hassan’s mother Nur Jahan Begum told the local reporters. “But we are tracking down the real killers. We have also identified who have vandalised the Hindu households and shops,” Rangpur’s police commissioner Mohammad Majid Ali told reporters. The Bangladesh Hindu Buddhist Christian Unity Council had on April 9 said there have been 133 incidents of communal violence between January 1 and March 31 this year. In the second incident, police and media reports said a group of assailants killed school teacher and spiritual figure Shamim Reza Jahangir and critically wounded at least seven of his followers and set on fire his sanctuary or ‘darbar’ over allegations of insulting Islam in Kushtia, about 200 kms west of Dhaka. “The local miscreants killed Jahangir. His body is being sent to Kushtia General Hospital morgue for an autopsy,” officer-in-charge of Kushtia’s Daulatpur police station Arifur Rahman told reporters. The media reports said the mob also set fire to Jahangir’s darbar. Officials said armed police and elite anti-crime Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) forces were sent to the scene to prevent further violence. Local journalists said police in May 2021 had arrested Jahangir responding to hard-line Islamists’ allegations that he was carrying out “controversial activities” but was released on a court order after a brief detention. Police did not elaborate on what the activities were.