(RSF/IFEX) – The editor of a regional weekly in the southwestern city of Khulna has been killed in a bomb attack, less than six months after the murder of a BBC World Service local correspondent in the same city. An armed, far-left group claimed responsibility for the latest killing. RSF and the Bangladesh Centre for […]
(RSF/IFEX) – The editor of a regional weekly in the southwestern city of Khulna has been killed in a bomb attack, less than six months after the murder of a BBC World Service local correspondent in the same city. An armed, far-left group claimed responsibility for the latest killing.
RSF and the Bangladesh Centre for Development, Journalism and Communications (BCDJC) joined in expressing their revulsion at the 27 June 2004 killing of Humayun Kabir Balu, aged 57, editor of “Dainik Janmabhumi”.
Attackers threw three bombs at Balu as he got out of his car in front of “Dainik Janmabhumi”‘s offices. He suffered serious stomach and leg injuries and died in hospital one hour later. His son, Asif Kabir, a journalism student, was seriously injured. Police sealed off the neighbourhood, but failed to catch his attackers, who escaped by motorcycle. They found two intact metal bottles filled with explosives at the scene.
A man calling himself Ripon Ahmed, the regional head of the Janajuddha (ML) faction of the clandestine Maoist Purba Bangla Communist Party, claimed responsibility in a telephone call to the Khulna Press Club, of which Balu was president, calling him a “class enemy.”
Several Khulna-based journalists said that Balu had received death threats in the previous weeks from criminals who demanded that he pay them the equivalent of 700 euros (approx. US$850). The journalist informed press club officials about the threats on 22 June.
Journalists in Khulna announced a week of demonstrations to call for justice and to pay tribute to their colleague, a veteran of the 1971 war of independence.
Manik Shaha, a journalist with the daily “New Age” and a BBC correspondent, was murdered when a bomb was thrown at his head in Khulna on 15 January (see IFEX alerts of 27 and 15 January 2004). At least fourteen journalists have been killed in south and southwestern Bangladesh in the past 10 years. Balu was the second Khulna Press Club president to be killed in 2004.
While the government continues to claim there is no press freedom problem in Bangladesh, armed groups and criminals of every stripe hold sway in entire regions of the country, RSF and the BCDJC said. The organisations called on the government, particularly the home affairs minister, to do everything possible to find and punish those behind the killing.
An RSF and BCDJC delegation visited Khulna in March 2002 in response to warnings from press club leaders, including Shaha and Balu, about the constant threat to the local press from far-left movements, which, after years of armed struggle, had turned themselves into criminal gangs.
