DHAKA, Bangladesh — Security officials arrested a suspect in the killing of a Bangladeshi-American blogger known for his antipathy toward religion, who was hacked to death in Dhaka, the capital, on Thursday.
The suspect, Shafiur Rahman Farabi, a 29-year-old student, was arrested on Monday in connection with the murder of Avijit Roy, who was attacked by machete-wielding assailants after leaving a book fair with his wife.
Commander Mufti Mahmud Khan, a spokesman for the elite police unit that arrested Mr. Farabi, said he had admitted to issuing a death threat against Mr. Roy online one year ago because of Mr. Roy’s writings, which were critical of extremist Islam. But Mr. Farabi told the police that he was at home at the time of Mr. Roy’s murder.
Monirul Islam, the joint commissioner of the detective unit of the Dhaka police, said Mr. Farabi was “a very important suspect” in Mr. Roy’s murder.
Mr. Khan said that Mr. Farabi already had a pending criminal case against him for threatening a cleric who conducted a prayer service at the funeral of another blogger, Rajib Haider, who was killed in 2013. Mr. Haider had been organizing protests demanding harsher punishments for perpetrators of war crimes in Bangladesh’s 1971 war for independence, and was a fierce critic of the Islamist political party Jamaat-e-Islami.
According to a statement released by the police on Monday, Mr. Farabi had posted a threat against Mr. Roy on Facebook last year, writing: “Avijit lives in America. It is not possible to kill him now. But he will be killed when he will be back in the country.”
The Center for Inquiry, a group based in Amherst, N.Y., that works to build secular societies, posted a piece after Mr. Roy’s death in which he referred to the Facebook threat in connection with the backlash over his book, “The Virus of Faith.” His father, Ajoy Roy, also mentioned Mr. Farabi’s threat in a complaint to the police.
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