ISIS have claimed responsibility for the killing of Hussein Ali Sarkar, a Christian stabbed to death yesterday in Bangladesh.
According to SITE, a US-based intelligence group, ISIS said they carried out the killing, which took place in Kurigram, north of Dhaka.
ISIS reportedly said that a “security detachment” killed the “preacher” to be a “lesson to others”.
Ali Sarkar, aged 68, converted to Christianity to Islam in 1999. Police said he was not a preacher.
Kurigram district police chief Tobarak Ullah told Reuters that three attackers stabbed Ali Sarkar while he was having his morning walk on Tuesday.
The killers then set off bombs “to create panic”, Ullah said.
In December, ISIS claimed responsibility for an attack on a mosque of Ahmadi Muslims, whom ISIS regard as polytheists.
A month earlier, ISIS’s magazine Dabiq published an article entitled “The Revival of Jihad in Bengal”, celebrating the spread of their network to Bangladesh.
The Bangladeshi government has denied that ISIS have a presence in the country. Police say a Bangladeshi militant group, Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen, was behind recent violence including the killing of Ali Sarkar.
Bangladesh has also seen increasing Islamist violence against atheists. Nine atheist bloggers have been murdered or seriously injured over the past three years.
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