Hindu temple volunteer hacked to death

A Hindu temple worker was hacked to death in western Bangladesh Friday, police said, the latest in a series of attacks on religious minorities by suspected Islamists.

Shyamananda Das, who helped to conduct prayers at the Radhamadan Gopal Bigraha Math in Jhenaidah district, was killed by three men on a motorcycle as he was walking on a highway adjacent to his temple early in the morning, police said.

"They hacked him on his neck three times and there was one stabbing mark in his head," deputy police chief of the district Gopinath Kanjilal told AFP.

"He died after he was brought to a hospital."

Kanjilal said Das, also known as Babaji, was "a priest" in the temple. But local police station chief inspector Hasan Hafizur Rahman told AFP the 50-year-old man was "a temple volunteer who helps conduct prayers".

"He was an itinerant temple volunteer who travels from one temple to another to serve the Hindu devotees. He came to this temple only yesterday," he said.  
Police said no group claimed responsibility of the attack, but it bore hallmarks of recent murders of religious minorities by suspected homegrown Islamist militants.

"The pattern of the killing is similar" to ones carried out by local Islamist militants, Rahman said.

Last month a Hindu priest, 70-year-old Ananda Gopal Ganguly, was also hacked to death in a rice paddy field in the same district near his home.

Deputy police chief Kanjilal said a student activist from the country's largest Islamist party, Jamaat-e-Islami, has been arrested over the attack and he had allegedly admitted his role in the killing.  

Bangladesh is reeling from a wave of murders of secular and liberal activists and religious minorities that have some 50 people dead in the last three years.

Victims of the attacks by suspected Islamists have included secular bloggers, gay rights activists and followers of minority religions.

Although it is officially secular, around 90 percent of Bangladesh's 160 million-strong population is Muslim and about one in ten are Hindu.