Dhaka: A case was filed with Khilgaon police station over the killing of blogger Niladri Chattopadhyay on Friday night.

Asha Moni, wife of the slain blogger, filed a case against four people with the police station at about midnight on 7 August, said Khilgaon police sub-inspector Jahidur Rahman.

A gang armed with machetes hacked a secular blogger to death at his home in Dhaka on Friday, sparking protests in the capital over the fourth such murder in Bangladesh this year.

Niladri, who used the pen-name Niloy Neel, was killed after the gang forced its way into his apartment, according to the Bangladesh Blogger and Activist Network, which was alerted to the attack by a witness.

‘They entered his room in the fifth floor and shoved his wife aside and then hacked him to death. He was a listed target of the Islamist militants,’ the network’s head, Imran H Sarker, reported AFP.

Police confirmed Chattopadhyay, 30, had been murdered at his home in the capital’s Goran neighbourhood by a group of four people who had pretended they were looking for somewhere to rent.

‘Two of them then took him to a room and slaughtered him there,’ said deputy police commissioner Muntashirul Islam, adding that his wife had been ‘confined to another room’ during the attack.

Asha Moni later told reporters that one of the young men attacked him shouting ‘Allahu Akbar (God is greatest)’.

Moni said she pleaded with the assailants not to kill her husband but the attackers dragged her to a veranda and confined her there, according to online newspaper.

The Bangladesh branch of Al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent (AQIS), Ansar al-Islam, claimed the killing and warned of more to come, according to monitoring group SITE.

‘If your ‘freedom of speech’ maintains no limits, then widen your chests for ‘freedom of our machetes’,’ the group, which also claimed to have murdered secular blogger Washiqur Rahman in March, said in posts on Twitter and Facebook.