Free Republic

Pakistan's top court on Wednesday acquitted a Christian woman who was sentenced to death in 2010 on blasphemy charges, a landmark ruling that could ignite mass protests or violence by hard-line Islamists. Chief Justice Mian Saqib Nisar announced the verdict to a packed courtroom and ordered Asia Bibi released. She has been held at an undisclosed location for security reasons and is expected to leave the country. The charges against Bibi date back to a hot day in 2009 when she went to get water for her and her fellow farmworkers. Two Muslim women refused to drink from a container...

Full Title: 'Death to the dictator!' Violence on streets of Iran as police use tear gas on furious protesters, including chador-clad women, demonstrating against 'corrupt regime' ruining the country while waging ideological war abroad Protests have broken out in a number of cities against Iranian regime this week Comes after the dramatic drop of Iran's currency and other economic problems 'The nation is forced to beg while the leader lives like God,' protesters chanted 'Death to the dictator!' Violence on streets of Iran as police use tear gas on furious protesters, including chador-clad women, demonstrating against 'corrupt regime' ruining the...

The maximum damage done to the image of Islam today is by the international media which is bombarding misconceptions about it day and night using an array of strategies. This was affirmed by renowned Islamic scholar Dr Zakir Naik on Thursday night, June 16, as part of his lecture 'Media & Islam "International media, be it print, audio, video, or online, use a number of strategies to malign Islam by first picking up the black sheep of the Muslim community, and portraying them as though they are exemplary Muslims." Media is the most important tool rather the most dangerous weapon...

The attack on Professor Rezaul Karim Siddiquee was so frenzied that its traces remain more than a month later, arcs of dried blood spattered up a pink wall and a pile of sand covering bloodstains that had pooled on the ground where the softly spoken lecturer was all but beheaded. He was killed on his way to work in the city of Rajshahi by four men who knew their target and his routines well. At least one of the killers was a former student who had a reputation for barracking the professor in class about the “immorality” of the English...

Bangladesh opposition leader Khaleda Zia has vowed to continue calling for general strikes unless the government restores a caretaker administration. "I will not let any election happen under Awami League," Ms Zia said in a rare interview with the BBC. The Bangladesh Nationalist Party and its allies have kept up a series of general strikes in recent weeks. Several opposition leaders have been arrested in the last month and charged with arson - charges the BNP denies. On Monday, 45 opposition members, including BNP acting secretary general Mirza Fakhrul Islam Alamgir, had charges for torching a bus during an anti-government...

Every month there is an incident, like taking property of Hindu people or forced conversion of Hindu girls. ... Minority Hindus have complained of increasing harassment and discrimination in Muslim-dominated Pakistan in recent years, including the destruction or desecration of their places of worship. ... Hindus complain that girls are forcibly converted to Islam, there is no legal recognition for Hindu marriages, and Hindus are discriminated against when it comes to access to government jobs or schooling. ... During partition in 1947, the violent separation of Pakistan and India into separate countries, hundreds of thousands of Hindus decided to migrate...

A prominent Bangladeshi-American blogger known for speaking out against religious extremism was hacked to death as he walked through Bangladesh's capital with his wife, police said Friday. The attack Thursday night on Avijit Roy, a Bangladesh-born U.S. citizen, occurred on a crowded sidewalk as he and his wife, Rafida Ahmed, were returning from a book fair at Dhaka University. Ahmed, who is also a blogger, was seriously injured. It was the latest in a series of attacks on secular writers in Bangladesh in recent years. A previously unknown militant group, Ansar Bangla 7, claimed responsibility for the attack, Assistant Police...

In a breakthrough, the CID today arrested two persons, both Bangladeshi Muslim nationals, one from West Bengal and the other from Mumbai, in connection with the gangrape of a 71-year-old nun at a convent school in Nadia district that caused a nation-wide outrage. ... The nun of Jesus and Mary Convent School was gangraped at Gangnapur in Nadia district of West Bengal in the early hours of March 14 which caused an outrage in the country and abroad

HAKA (Reuters) - A blogger was hacked to death by machete-wielding attackers in Bangladesh on Tuesday, the third killing of a critic of religious extremism in the Muslim-majority nation in less than three months. Ananta Bijoy Das, a blogger who advocated secularism, was attacked by four masked assailants in the northeastern district of Sylhet on Tuesday morning, senior police official Mohammad Rahamatullah told Reuters. Rahamatullah said Das was a 33-year-old banker. He was also editor of science magazine "Jukti", which means "logic", and on the advisory board of "Mukto Mona" (Free Mind), a website propagating rationalism and opposing fundamentalism that...

Last May, I wrote about the hacking death of Bangladeshi blogger Ananta Bijoy Das by Islamists. Das was the third blogger to be executed by Islamists in 2015. Well, now make it four. Islamists have murdered 40-year old Niloy Neel. Here is what the BBC has to say about it: The BBC’s Akbar Hossain in Dhaka says Mr Neel had filed a police report expressing fear for his life, but his complaints had not been not followed up.SNIP Neel, Das along with Avijit Roy and Washiqur Rahman were on a list of 84 bloggers Islamists wanted the government to put...

Muslims have beheaded two Christians in New Jersey, a cat in Sweden, and now an anti-jihad blogger...just this week. via Anti-Islamist blogger killed in Bangladesh: police | NDTV.com. h/t Atlas Shrugs Dhaka: A blogger who had been critical of Bangladesh’s Islamist groups was killed in the capital late on Friday, police said, a day after he attended a big rally against leaders of the country’s largest Islamic party. Protests championed by the country’s bloggers have seen thousands of people take to the streets demanding the execution of leaders of the Jamaat-e-Islami party who are under trial for war crimes. Clashes...

DHAKA: A masked gang wielding machetes hacked a secular blogger to death Tuesday in northeastern Bangladesh in the third such deadly attack by suspected Islamists since February. Police said that Ananta Bijoy Das had been murdered in broad daylight as he headed to work at a local bank in the city of Sylhet, an attack that fellow writers said highlighted a culture of impunity. Kamrul Hasan, commissioner of Sylhet police, said that a group of around four masked attackers had attacked Das with machetes at around 8.30am on a busy street in Bangladesh's fifth largest city. "They chased him down...

Neel’s murder is the fourth such brutal murder in the country. Machete-wielding masked men in May hacked to death 33-year-old Ananta Bijoy Das, a secular blogger, in Sylhet city. Assailants in February had killed 45-year old Avijit Roy, a Bangladeshi-born US national, here while his wife narrowly escaped the attack. A month after Roy’s killing, another blogger Washiqur Rahman was murdered in similar fashion in Dhaka but people in the neighbourhood nabbed two suspected killers from the scene and handed them over to police. All three killed were involved with the Ganajagaran Mancha. In May, terror group al-Qaeda in the...

There’s been a series of violent murders of Bangladeshi internet bloggers, accused of being atheists by Islamist groups—with four killed so far this year. […] Bonya Ahmed is herself a writer and was also married to perhaps the most famous atheist killed this year, Avijit Roy—the moderator of a popular online blog called “Free Thinking,” which defended secular and humanist ideas. She and her husband were attacked together in February. Bonya lost fingers and was scarred, but lived. Her husband was hacked to death with machetes in a manner that followed the same gruesome pattern of later killings. They had...

Bangladesh could drop Islam as the country's official religion following a string of extremist attacks against people of other faiths. The supreme court in the South Asia nation has began to hear arguments which challenge Islam's status as the official state religion. It comes after a spate of attacks against people of other religions such as Hindus, Christians, and minorities Shi'ites, which have been blamed on Islamic extremists. When Bangladesh was formed in 1971 after the nation split from Pakistan, it was declared a secular state. However, in 1988 the country's constitution was amended with Islam declared as the state...

Killing resembles recent attacks on religious minorities, police sayPolice are hunting for the killers of a Christian man hacked to death in northwestern Bangladesh on March 22. The murder was the latest in a series of attacks on religious minorities in the Muslim-majority country. Three attackers rode up on motorbikes and repeatedly stabbed Hossain Ali, 68, while he was taking a regular morning walk in Kurigram district. They then fled after detonating two small homemade bombs as local people tried to help the victim, police said. Ali, a retired Family Planning Department official, also fought against Pakistani troops in Bangladesh's...

Bangladeshi law student who criticized Islamism on his Facebook account has been attacked with machetes and killed, police said, the latest in a series of murders of secular activists and bloggers by suspected Islamist militants.

Two people have been hacked to death at an apartment, including an editor of a transgender magazine in the Bangladesh. Another person was also killed and one person injured when three attackers entered their apartment in Dhaka posing as couriers and attacked them with sharp weapons, police said on Monday. Julhas Mannan ran a transgender magazine Rupban and previously worked at the US embassy.

Gay rights activist, U.S. government employee one of two hacked to death by radical Islamists in Bangladesh THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Monday, April 25, 2016, 6:33 PM NEW DELHI — Unidentified assailants fatally stabbed two men in Bangladesh’s capital Monday night, including a gay rights activist who also worked for the U.S. Agency for International Development, police said, in the latest in a series of attacks targeting atheists, moderates and foreigners. Police said they suspected radical Islamists in the attack, which occurred two days after a university professor was hacked to death. There was no immediate claim of responsibility.

A court in southern Bangladesh sentenced two Hindu schoolteachers to six months in jail for making "abusive" remarks about Islam that led a mob to attack their school, a magistrate said Tuesday.