ANANTA BIJOY DAS has just become the third of three online writers to be set upon and slashed to death in Bangladesh this year. He was 32 years old and, like the two who were murdered before him, he was a “secular” blogger—in the sense that his writing made it plain that he was not in favour of politicised religion. Many other Bangladeshis have been killed on the streets in the past few months, some of them victims of political violence. But the deaths of this trio of bloggers mark a worrying new trend, one that seems to reflect a greater darkness on the political horizon.

All three were science enthusiasts. They were bookish, educated men, poking their heads above the parapet to challenge various religious conventions. Avijit Roy, the first to be killed, was hacked to death on the streets of Dhaka, the capital, while making his way home from a book fair. Roy had moved to America and naturalised there, and came back to Bangladesh to promote a book he had written and titled “Virus of Faith”. The second blogger, Washiqur Rahman, was a 27-year-old who used his status updates on Facebook to make derisive fun of conservative interpretations of Islam. The young men apprehended for his murder were identified quickly as radical Islamists.

Mr Das (pictured on the banner above) was perhaps less a provocateur than either of those two. He edited a quarterly called Jukti or “Logic” and contributed to Mr Roy’s Mukto-Mona blog, where he was a long-time writer on science and social critique. His last blog post showed up online as he prepared to leave for work on May 12th in the north-eastern city of Sylhet. It was just minutes later that four masked assailants ran at him with cleavers, less than 200 metres from his house.

In that final post he criticised a separatist attitude that has been going round conservative Sylhet in recent years. Mr Das likened the separatists to the proverbial frog in a well. “No one [should] limit themselves within the walls of narrow-mindedness…it’s time for them to crawl out of the well and view our enormous universe from a new perspective. All of us are human, and all of us are Bangladeshi Bengalis.”

The week prior to his death the Swedish embassy had rejected Mr Das’s application for a visa. He had proposed to make only a short trip to Sweden, but the embassy staff surmised that he would have had plenty of reason to try staying, once he got in.