DHAKA: A Bangladeshi court has issued an arrest warrant for the writer of a 2003 novel that allegedly contains blasphemous remarks against the Prophet (PBUH), a lawyer said on Tuesday.

The court in Dhaka issued the order in response to a petition from a Muslim activist accusing author Salam Azad of hurting religious sentiment in his banned book “Bhanga Math” (“Broken Temple”).

We told the court that the book contained blasphemous remarks against the Prophet (PBUH) and Islam. The judge accepted the petition and issued a warrant of arrest,” the petitioner's lawyer Ekhlas Uddin said.

Azad, 48, said the book, published in the eastern Indian city of Kolkata, was banned for blasphemy by the Bangladeshi government in 2004. In May Bangladesh banned a novel by popular writer Humayun Ahmed for allegedly distorting how the nation's first president and his family were murdered in 1975.—AFP