Dhaka, April 11 A Muslim religious leader was murdered by being hacked to death for allegedly insulting Islam, while shops and homes owned by Hindus were vandalized in separate mob attacks in western Kushtia and northwestern Rangpur in Bangladesh on Saturday.
An angry mob attacked several Hindu homes and businesses in the early hours of the morning in Rangpur, about 300 kilometers northwest of Dhaka, over the death of a Muslim youth in their neighborhood.
A "third party" carried out the vandalism to divert attention from the overnight murder of a man named Rakib Hassan, police claimed.
The Prothom Alo newspaper reported that more than a hundred members of the Hindu community live in the Daspara market area, where Hassan was allegedly murdered by drug dealer Mohammad Momin over a previous dispute.
Reporters found Momin's house empty as he had gone into hiding, while his family members feared retaliatory attacks, the newspaper said.
Police said the attack took place even though the deceased youth's family said the Hindu community had nothing to do with his murder.
"We have no problems with them (Hindus)," Hassan's mother, Nur Jahan Begum, told local reporters.
"But we are tracking down the real killers. We have also identified who vandalized the Hindu homes and shops," Rangpur's police commissioner Mohammad Majid Ali told reporters.
The Bangladesh Hindu Buddhist Christian Unity Council had on April 9 said that there had 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 religious figure Shamim Reza Jahangir and critically wounded at least seven of his followers, and set fire to his place of worship, known as a 'darbar', in Kushtia, about 200 kilometers west of Dhaka, over allegations of insulting Islam.
"The local thugs killed Jahangir. His body is being sent to the 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 that police had arrested Jahangir in May 2021, responding to allegations by hard-line Islamists that he was involved in "controversial activities," but he was released on a court order after a brief detention. Police did not elaborate on the nature of the activities.