Extremists resented him for openly and regularly criticizing religion in his blog. They threatened to kill him if he came home from the United States to visit.
On Thursday, someone did.
As usual, Roy defied the threats and departed his home in suburban Atlanta for Dhaka, where he appeared at a speaking engagement about his latest books — one of them titled “The Virus of Faith.” He has written seven books in all.
As he walked back from the book fair, assailants plunged machetes and knives into Roy and his wife, killing him and leaving her bloodied and missing a finger.
Afterward, an Islamist group “Ansar Bangla-7” reportedly tweeted, “Target Down here in Bangladesh.”
Investigators are proceeding on the notion that Roy’s murder was an extremist attack. His father, Ajay Roy, filed a case of murder with the Shahbagh police Friday without naming suspects.
No one came to their aid as they were hacked down, a witness said. “I shouted for help from the people but nobody came to save him.”
But at night, secularist sympathizers marched through a street holding torches; by day, others held a sit-in to protest Roy’s killing. The government condemned the attack.
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His book “hit the cranial nerve of Islamic fundamentalists,” Roy wrote. After the Charlie Hebdo attacks, an online Bangladeshi bookstore pulled it after extremists put pressure on it.
But is seemed the author was safe in Alpharetta.
“Avijit Roy lives in America and so, it is not possible to kill him right now. But he will be murdered when he comes back,” the Islamist wrote, according to Roy.
He couldn’t let that stop him, Roy’s friend Michael De Dora said.
“Avijit was very idealistic,” he said. “His understanding was that he wouldn’t be killed, that if anyone ever tried to attack him or hated him, that they could just kind of have a chat and he would convince them … that they could at least have a dialogue.”
He never had a chance to. They attacked from behind.
CNN’s Ray Sanchez, Lonzo Cook, Greg Botelho, Farid Ahmed and John Couwels contributed to this report.
