A special tribunal in eastern Bangladesh announced on Wednesday that four men had been sentenced to death for the 2015 murder of a blogger and writer who had promoted secularism in the Muslim-majority country.

The victim, Ananta Bijoy Das, 32, a banker by profession who wrote for the platform Free Mind, was among several bloggers and writers fatally attacked that year. He was chased down in the eastern city of Sylhet by four men, who stabbed him to death on a street close to his home and left his body near a pond.

“We are happy with the verdict,” Somor Bijoy Shee Shakhor, Das’s brother-in-law, told The New York Times. “We cannot get Ananta back. The only thing we want is justice.”

Just 10 weeks before Das’s death in May 2015, Avijit Roy, a Bangladeshi-American who was the moderator of Free Mind, had also been killed, by machete-wielding assailants as he was leaving a book fair in Dhaka.

And five weeks after Roy’s death, another blogger, Oyasiqur Rahman, was killed by three men with machetes in Dhaka.

Later that year, Faisal Arefin Dipan, Roy’s publisher, was killed by a group of assailants in his Dhaka office.

The killings sent a chilling message to secular bloggers in Bangladesh, where a bitter cultural battle has raged over whether the country is, or should be, a Muslim state.

(New York Times News Service)