In a horrible incident in Bangladesh, a University Professor was hacked to death by the unidentified attackers on Saturday. The Police said that the assault bore the hallmarks of previous killings by Islamist militants of secular and atheist activists. The University Professor was identified as Rezaul Karim Siddique, 58 who teaches English was hacked on the back with heavy knives.

Police said he walked to the bus station from his home in the country’s north-western city of Rajshahi, where he taught at the city’s public university. “His neck was hacked three times and was 70-80 percent slit. Coming to an understanding, “we suspect that it was carried out by extremist groups,” Rajshahi metropolitan police commissioner Mohammad Shamsuddin said.

According to the Police, there were no names found as suspects but the pattern of the attack was exactly same as the previous killings by Islamist militants. Nahidul Islam, a deputy commissioner of police, said Siddique was involved in cultural programmes, including music, and set up a school at Bagmara, a former bastion of an outlawed Islamist group, Jamayetul Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB).

Home-grown Islamist militants have been blamed for these murders of secular bloggers since 2013. Police said that in every attack, unidentified assailants hacked the victim to death with machetes or cleavers. According to the US group SITE, Ansar al-Islam, a Bangladesh branch of al-Qaida in the Indian subcontinent, this month claimed responsibility for the murder of 26-year-old Nazimuddin Samad, a law student who was killed on the streets of Dhaka.

The recent killings have sparked outrage at home and abroad, with international rights groups demanding that the secular government protect freedom of speech in the Muslim-majority country.