Four killings in just five days! It all started with the hacking and shooting of Mahmuda Khanam, wife of police officer Babul Akhter. Then a small trader of the Christian community was butchered. This was followed by the slaying of a Hindu priest in Jhinaidah and on Friday morning another priest of Thakur Anukul Chandra Satsangha Sebashram in Pabna was done to death in similar manner.
Clearly, these are target killings and were started systematically quite sometime ago. Professor Humayun Azad of the University of Dhaka first came under such an attack -one in which machetes are used to hack the victim. Prof. Azad somehow survived the attack but his life was subsequently cut short and he died in Germany. Others were not lucky enough.
The impression was that only bloggers or online writers were the primary targets. Until 2015 such an impression prevailed. But then a wide range of targets was chosen. Foreign nationals rendering voluntary services or working for non-government organisations were targeted for a while. Of late, though, the concentration is more on members of the minority communities -- priests and men engaged in religious services in mosques of mostly Shia Muslim sect, temples, churches and a Buddhist shrine.
They are soft targets but implication of such killings has dangerous dimensions because of the communal nature of the deadly mayhem. Although people in power have been issuing statements that the killers will not be spared, they will be pursued wherever they may be hiding, such assurances sound hollow and do not assure anyone -- least of all who consider themselves vulnerable to the clandestine and surprise attacks.
In the killing incident of Oyasikur Rahman, two killers got caught courtesy of a transvestite. The few arrests made in connection with other such murders have not been conclusive yet. Even the law enforcers have not been able to make much progress in the Oyasikur slaughter case. People hoped this would lead to unravelling the secret of the killing mission and the men behind it.
This is awfully frustrating for the common people -particularly the members of the minority community. The sense of insecurity is growing and overshadowing many of the government's achievements. Already, countries wishing Bangladesh well have expressed their grave concern over the systematic killings. After all, at the end of the day, it remains to be a legal issue. If conditions are created for law to take its own course, such crimes cannot happen.
Power-wielders and their executive organs prove ineffective before such challenges only when both suffer from moral decay. People are always ready to support any campaign carried sincerely against the criminals. But if compromises on such issues are made for personal gains, they simply lose the moral courage to take the fight to the killers and criminals. For example, the law enforcement agencies are alleged to have taken opportunities of mass arrests in order to lining their pockets instead of concentrating on their main task of screening the real culprits.
What happens in the process is a breach of trust. Social commitment suffers as a result. Lawless becomes the order of the day. And in an environment like this life, property, business and commerce, cultural activities and other areas of human interactions become a casualty. After sometime the country's economy is badly affected leading to more crimes and, still more frighteningly, political upheaval. Before the situation deteriorates further, let the drive against the secret killers spearheaded unrelentingly in order to hole them out.
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