NEW DELHI: A Hindu temple worker was hacked to death in western Bangladesh on Friday, police said adding that the incident was the latest in a series of attacks on religious minorities by suspected Islamists.

Three men on a motorcycle attacked Shyamananda Das as he walked along a road near the temple early in the morning, police said.

“They hacked him on his neck three times and there was one stabbing mark in his head,” Deputy District Police Chief Gopinath Kanjilal said.

“He died after he was brought to hospital.” Police said the 50-year-old, also known as Babaji, was a volunteer who helped conduct prayers in temples.

“He was an itinerant temple volunteer who travels from one temple to another to serve Hindu devotees. He came to this temple only yesterday,” said local Police Chief Inspector Hasan Hafizur Rahman.

“He was attacked as he walked outside the temple to collect flowers for prayer services,” he said.

No group had claimed the responsibility of the attack, but police said it bore the hallmarks of recent murders of religious minorities by suspected home-grown Islamist militants.

Last month a Hindu priest, 70-year-old Ananda Gopal Ganguly, was hacked to death in the same district.

Days later, a Hindu monastery worker was murdered in the same way in a northwestern district.

Deputy Police Chief Kanjilal said an activist with the student wing of the country’s largest Islamist party, Jamaat-i-Islami, had been arrested over the attack.

Hours before the murder, two Jamaat student activists were shot dead in a gunfight with police just a few kilometres from the Hindu temple, two police officials said.

“They are local leaders of Islami Chhatra Shibir and were suspects in last month’s murder of the Hindu priest,” Rahman said.

Bangladesh is reeling from a wave of murders of secular and liberal activists and religious minorities that had left some 50 people dead in the last three years.

Victims of attacks by suspected Islamists included secular bloggers, gay rights activists and followers of minority religions including Hindus, Christians and Muslim Sufis and Shias.

Since April, more than a dozen people had been hacked to death amid a sharp spike in the targeted killings.

Most of the recent attacks had been claimed by the militant Islamic State group or the South Asian branch of Al Qaeda.

Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s government, however, had blamed home-grown Islamists for the attacks.

Experts say a government crackdown on opponents, including a ban on the Jamaat-i-Islami following a protracted political crisis, had pushed many towards extremism.

Last month police arrested more than 11,000 people, including nearly 200 suspected militants, in an anti-Islamist drive criticised by the opposition and some rights groups, which said it was used as an excuse to clamp down on dissent.

Published in Dawn, July 2nd, 2016