Avijit Roy was hacked to death by two assailants with machetes on the streets of the capital Dhaka in February as he returned from a book fair with his wife.
AQIS leader Asim Umar
...chief of al-Qaeda's Sharia Committee for Pakistain, named head of al-Qaeda in India. His video appearances are frequently accompanied by clips of al Qaeda's senior propagandist in Pakistan, Ahmad Farooq. Umar the author of
The Army of Anti-Christ: Blackwater, Documentation of the Dreadful Terrorist Activities of America's Blackwater in Islamic Countries...
said his organization was responsible for the attack in a video posted on jihadist forums on Saturday, according to SITE, a U.S. website that monitors Lion of Islam groups.
He also claimed the murders of other "blasphemers".
A front man for Bangladesh's Rapid Action Battalion
(RAB) force, which is tasked with tackling militancy in the Moslem-majority nation, said it couldn't be certain the claim was correct."We are not sure," Mufti Mahmud told Agence La Belle France Presse when asked if Al-Qaeda was behind the deaths of Roy and anti-Islam writers Ahmed Rajib Haider and Washiqur Rahman.
Haider and Rahman were also killed by machete-wielding attackers. Haider died in 2013 and Rahman was hacked to death in March.
A little-known Bangladeshi holy warrior group called Ansarullah Bangla Team (ABT) has also apparently grabbed credit for Roy's murder via a twitter account which police have not been able to verify as genuine.
The Bangladesh-born writer, who emigrated to the southern U.S. state of Georgia some 15 years ago, was well known in his native land for his Mukto-Mona (Free-mind) blog where he railed against all forms of organised religion.
He was also the author of a series of books, including the best-selling "The Virus of Faith", which was hugely contentious in Bangladesh, an officially secular state where around 90 percent of people are Moslem.
In March, police jugged
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two madrassa students over the killing of Rahman. Police are investigating whether they belonged to ABT and whether they had any connection with Roy's murder.