An activist shouts slogans during a rally in Dhaka April 4, 2013. He is a member of the Hefajat-e-Islam, a radical Islamist party that has demanded capital punishment for secular Bangladeshi bloggers.
He is the fourth man of his kind to be hacked to death in the past six months in Bangladesh.
The reason he was targeted? He wrote a blog.
Niloy Chatterjee was born into a Hindu family. He studied philosophy and was an atheist, writing under the pen name Niloy Neel.
"He criticized Islam, Buddhism and Hinduism," says his friend and colleague Asif Mohiuddin, from his adoptive home in Germany.
Mohiuddin, a Bangladeshi blogger himself, fled his homeland after he, too, was targeted by Islamic extremists. He met Neel back in 2010 at a talk about Charles Darwin. They became friends.
"He was a very sharp man," Mohiuddin recalls, "he loved to read."
Three years after that meeting, Islamists in Bangladesh published a hit list of atheist bloggers in the country. Since then, bloggers are being hacked to death.
They didn't stop with the names on the list.
Bloggers not on the list are being killed, too. Neel, for example, wasn't on the list.
"That is very scary," Mohiuddin says.
Mohiuddin says Neel knew he was at risk in Bangladesh. "He told me, 'I don't feel very safe but I don't want to leave Bangladesh.'"
Mohiuddin warned him to be cautious and not to post any pictures of himself on Facebook. But that didn't stop the militants from locating Neel and hacking him to death.
Mohiuddin says the Bangladeshi government is turning a blind eye toward these crimes. That's why he would like to see the international community increase its pressure on the government.
"We are only writing," he says, "we are not killing anyone."
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