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| Bangladesh |
| Elderly Buddhist monk hacked to death in Bangladesh |
| 2016-05-15 |
| [DAWN] An elderly Buddhist monk was found hacked to death Saturday in Bangladesh, police said, the latest in a spate of murders of religious minorities and secular activists in the Muslim-majority nation. No group has yet grabbed credit, although the killing in the remote southeastern district of Bandarban appeared to bear a resemblance to several recent murders by suspected myrmidons. A troubling rise in violence in the South Asian nation has now seen seven murders since the start of last month alone. "Villagers found Bhante (monk) Maung Shue U Chak's dead body in a pool of blood inside the Buddhist temple this morning. He was hacked to death," Jashim Uddin, deputy police chief of Bandarban, told AFP. Uddin said the monk, 75, appeared to have been attacked by at least four people at the Buddhist temple in Baishari, some 350 kilometres southeast of Dhaka early Saturday morning. "We saw human footprints in the temple and found that four to five people entered the compound," he added. He said U Chak was living alone in the hillside temple after having recently left farming to become a full-time monk. A top Bangladeshi human rights ...which are usually open to widely divergent definitions... lawyer who is close to the country's Buddhist community told AFP that U Chak had received anonymous death threats. "He became a monk just one and a half years ago. He had received death threats, but nobody took it seriously," lawyer Jyotirmoy Barua said. Bandarban is largely Buddhist, home to indigenous peoples who adopted the religion centuries ago. Police district sub-inspector Anisur Rahman, who was at the scene, said that officers had not yet established a motive for the killing but that "it appeared the monk did not have any personal enemies". |
| Posted by:Fred |