Farabi was earlier arrested for inciting attacks on bloggers on the
social media after blogger Ahmed Rajib Haider’s murder in 2013.
He had then secured bail from the High Court.
RAB’s
Additional Director General Col Ziaul Ahsan told bdnews24.com that he
was nabbed on Monday morning from Dhaka’s Jatrabarhi area while he was
leaving the city.
“Fundamentalist blogger Farabi is the prime suspect of writer Avijit Roy’s murder,” Ahsan said.
Farabi had also threatened an online bookshop ‘rokomari.com’ to pull out Roy’s books from their site.
Avijit
was hacked to death on Feb 26 by unknown assailants at Dhaka University
when he was returning from the Ekushey Book Fair. His wife Rafida Ahmed
Bonya was also injured.
The US-based writer-blogger had been
receiving regular threats for his writings against communalism,
fanaticism and religious superstition.
The international
community, including the UN, US and EU, strongly criticised the murder
of the founder of Mukto-Mona (Free-thinker), a blog which used
scientific facts to address religious radicalism.
The US offered
the services of their Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to help
investigate the murder, after Bangladesh government took up the matter
with it, foreign minister A H Mahmud Ali told journalists on Sunday.
RAB
Media Wing Director Mufti Mahmud Khan said in a briefing
around noon that Avijit and Farabi met each other on Facebook around
four to five years ago.
Avijit had blocked the fanatic blogger two years back because of their ideological differences.
“Farabi
in different statuses and comments, had posted pictures of Avijit with
his family and threatened to kill him when he returned to the country.”
Mufti added that Farabi also posted religiously provocative statuses from a Facebook page called ‘Farabi Blog’.
The RAB official also said that Avijit’s father too had alleged that Farabi was linked to the murder.
Farabi has been arrested over the case.
The
RAB in its briefing also said that Farabi had enrolled into Chittagong
University to study physics but could not finish studies. He tried to
join Hizb-utTahrir in 2010.
He had also served a month in prison for sabotage.
Farabi
came into the spotlight in 2013 after he had threatened to kill the
Imam who would lead the Namaaj-e-Janaza (Funeral prayer) of blogger
Ahmed Rajib Haider.
He was arrested on Feb 24 that year under the
ICT Act for the threat and was released on bail on Aug 21. Immediately
after the release, he started posting statuses and comments propagating
murder of atheists.
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