Freedom of speech took another dying breath on Thursday night when US-Bangladeshi blogger Avijit Roy was hacked to death in the middle of a street in Dhaka and his wife wounded for no apparent crime other than expressing his mind and disseminating his opinion on the internet. Roy was a well-known liberal blogger and founder of the Mukto-Mona (Free-mind) blogging website, known for his critical views about Islam. It seems that was enough of a ‘crime’ for unknown assailants to drag him and his wife off a bicycle rickshaw they were on — on their way back from a book fair — and attack them with machetes and meat cleavers. They killed Roy and seriously injured his wife, who lost a finger. While no one has so far stepped forward to take responsibility for this gruesome murder, there is little doubt that this is the work of one of the many extreme right-wing Islamist groups in the country. Roy had been threatened before by these same Islamists but he did not let their fear deter him from expressing his ideas and critique. In today’s world that is a very brave stand to take, one that Avijit Roy paid for with his life. Extremists, no matter where they are found in the world, are always enemies of freedom of expression. Their extreme take on Islam has limited their ability to think and to live and let live, wiping away any trace of humanity. The manner in which Roy was murdered is so savage and so cruel that one begins to realise that this is not merely opposition to freedom of speech and thought; it is the incitement of a full-blown war against those who prize openness and free thinking and those who wish to clamp down on all critical thought. Because of fundamentalists such as these, the whole Muslim world is fast gaining a highly tarnished image all over the world. Maybe that is what these people want, to isolate the Muslim world and keep all Muslims under their draconian control. Was being an atheist enough to warrant Roy’s death? He is the second liberal blogger to be killed in Bangladesh in two years and the fourth writer to have been attacked in that country since 2004. Islamists in Bangladesh have long been calling for the killing of all such thinkers and writers, an appalling demand that is being articulated in the public sphere. We have been seeing an alarming trend since the 1989 fatwa against author Salman Rushdie by Ayatollah Khomeini of secular thinkers and writers being targeted by Islamic fundamentalists. It seems such harsh punishments for the ‘crime’ of freedom of thought have become accepted norms in the Islamist world with no let up in sight. The heinous murder of Avijit Roy is only the latest in a tragic, bloody line of forgotten crimes. *