On Thursday night, Avijit Roy, a well-known Bangladeshi American writer and religious skeptic, was surrounded by unidentified assailants armed with cleavers and hacked to death on a street in Dhaka. His wife, Rafida Ahmed, sustained serious wounds and is fighting for her life. On social media, you can find awful images of the immediate aftermath of the incident, with Ahmed, drenched in blood, standing stunned by the fallen body of her husband.

A previously unknown Islamist group named Ansar Bangla 7 claimed responsibility for the attack, according to the Associated Press, saying on Twitter that Roy was targeted because of his crimes against Islam.

Roy, who was based in the United States, had just arrived in Bangladesh a week before attending a book festival. An engineer by training, he had originated a popular, secularist blog and gained a reputation as a prominent advocate of humanism and tolerance. His Hindu background was less relevant than his scientific atheism. Friends claimed he had received numerous death threats from fundamentalists irked by his outspoken commentary on religion.

I have profound interest in freethinking, skepticism, philosophy, scientific thoughts and human rights of people, Roy wrote on his Facebook page, by way of biographical description. In a post on his Mukto-Mona blog, Roy, 42, questioned the credibility of the Koran, challenging the contention of some Islamic scholars that there's any scientific merit to the text.

Following the hideous terror attacks on a school in the Pakistani city of Peshawar and on the Paris offices of satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo last month, Roy likened religion to a virus in a tweet.

Such sentiments proved too dangerous in Bangladesh's complicated milieu. The country has one of the largest populations of Muslims in the world, and Islam is enshrined as a state religion. In 2013, another secular blogger, Ahmed Rajib Haider, was killed by extremists, sparking similar free speech protests as Roy's death prompted this week.

But Bangladesh also has a deep tradition of secularism - the country broke away from Pakistan following a bloody war in 1971. Bengali nationalism, harbored also by the country's religious minorities, trumped the pan-Islamism that defined the Pakistani state. Bangladesh does not have blasphemy laws on its books.

Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina has embarked on a controversial crackdown of Islamists, which included prominent politicians who had sided against the country's independence four decades ago.

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Terrorists murder American blogger