Indian police arrested a death row convict militant in connection with the killing of blogger and science writer Ananta Bijoy Das in Sylhet.
They arrested was identified as Faisal Ahmed, 27. Indian police arrested him from Bengaluru of India.
Anti-Terrorism Unit (ATU) of Bangladesh Police Superintendent Md Aslam Khan confirmed it on Wednesday.
He said the specialized police unit was now working on Faisal’s extradition.
Faisal was a student of medicine at the time of the murder. He is an active member of the Al-Qaeda affiliated Ansar al-Islam — previously Ansarullah Bangla Team.
On May 12 in 2015, Ananta Bijoy Das, 32, a writer linked to the Mukto-Mona website and editor of the magazine Jukti, was hacked to death by militants in broad day light in Sylhet.
Ananta’s elder brother Ratneshwar filed the murder case the same day. The case was later transferred to the CID.
Ansar al-Islam later claimed responsibility for the murder.
Sylhet Anti-Terrorism Tribunal on March 30 sentenced four people to death for the murder of Ananta.
The convicts — Abul Hossain, 25, Faisal Ahmed, 27, Harun or Rashid, 25, and Abul Khair Rashid Ahmed, 24 — were also fined Tk 20,000 each.
Of the four, only Rashid was in jail at the time. The others had been tried in absentia.
The court acquitted accused Shafiur Rahman Farabi, 30, as the prosecution had been unable to prove the charges against him.
Another accused, AB MannanYahya aka Ibn Moin, was acquitted as he had died in prison in 2019 while on trial.
Ananta’s killing followed two such murders in Dhaka that year — blogger Avijit Roy was hacked to death on February 26 and Washiqur Rahman was killed on March 30. Later the same year, on August 7, Niloy Neel, known for blogging about his atheistic views, was hacked to death by a gang armed with machetes, also in the capital.
On February 16 last year, five members of Ansar al-Islam were sentenced to death while another was awarded life imprisonment for the murder of Avijit.
The murder cases of Washiqur and Niloy are yet to be disposed of.