Just a month after a US-based Bangladeshi blogger was hacked to death near the TSC roundabout on DU campus, another blogger named Washiqur was chopped to death in Dhaka on Monday. The chain of incidents shows the brutal attacks on the nation’s independent writers, said an official.

"He was brutally hacked to death this morning with big knives just 500 yards (460 meters) from his home at Dhaka's Begunbari area," local police chief Wahidul Islam told AFP.

Police detained two suspects immediately after the attack trying to flee the scene.

Police said they were unsure whether the victim, Washiqur Rahman, 27, was also an atheist blogger but another social media writer said that he was known to write "against religious fundamentalism".

"It appeared Rahman used to write using a penname Kutshit Hasher Chhana (Ugly Duckling)," Imran Sarker, head of Blogger and Online Activists Network in Bangladesh, told AFP.

"He was a progressive free thinker and was against religious fundamentalism," he said.

Police have also arrested a suspect over the killing in February of American atheist writer and blogger Avijit Roy.

Roy was the second atheist blogger to have been murdered in the Muslim-majority country in the last two years and the fourth writer to have been attacked since 2004.

His killing sparked uproar at home and abroad with hundreds of secular activists holding protests for days to demand justice.

They also slammed the country's secular government for not doing enough to protect humanist writers.

- Manohar