Statements attributed to a regional division of Al Qaeda late on Saturday claimed responsibility for attacks on two publishers in Bangladesh who put out works critical of fundamentalist Islam, according to the SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors radical Islamic propaganda.
The statements will feed into a debate over whether transnational terrorism groups have an organizational presence in Bangladesh, and they follow three similar statements that said the Islamic State had carried out attacks on foreigners and Shiite Muslims.
Bangladesh's prime minister, Sheikh Hasina, has been adamant that the rise in targeted violence is emanating from political opposition figures in Bangladesh, and the police have named or arrested suspects with links to two main opposition groups, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party and Jamaat-e-Islami, an allied Islamist party.
Two businessmen who had published the works of Avijit Roy, a Bangladeshi-American known for his critical writings on religious extremism, were stabbed on Saturday by groups of men in the Bangladeshi capital, Dhaka, the police said.
