Dhaka: Bangladesh’s elite security force on Tuesday arrested three suspected Islamist militants, including a British citizen who police said was the ‘main planner’ of the murder of two prominent atheist bloggers.

Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) spokesmen said they arrested Touhidur Rahman, 58, and two other ‘active members’ of Islamic group Ansarullah Bangla Team (ABT), which was banned in May over a series of killings of bloggers.

‘We’ve arrested them in the capital today. We can confirm that Rahman is a Bangladesh-origin British citizen. He is the main planner of the attacks on Avijit Roy and Ananta Bijoy Das,’ Major Maksudul Alam of the RAB told AFP.

‘He told us that he is a British citizen,’ said Mufti Mahmood, the head of the RAB’s legal and media division.

Four secular bloggers have been hacked to death in Muslim-majority Bangladesh since the start of the year, including Roy and Das, prompting international condemnation and sparking protests mainly by secular activists in the capital.

Roy, a US citizen who was born in Bangladesh, was murdered in February by a gang wielding machetes in Dhaka. Das, 33, was killed in similar fashion as he headed to work at a bank in the northeastern city of Sylhet on May 13.

The government has vowed to hunt down the killers after facing accusations that too little was being done to stop such attacks.

Rahman ‘shadowed bloggers’

After studying IT, Rahman worked for about 22 years in Britain before moving to Bangladesh where he became a top aide to ABT’s firebrand spiritual leader, according to Mahmood.  

‘He came to Bangladesh in 2012 and did not go back,’ Mahmood told AFP.

Police described Rahman as the main planner of the attacks as well as the ‘main financier’ of ABT, whose members are mostly students from private universities.

Rahman shadowed bloggers Roy and Das in the days before their deaths, after ABT’s spiritual leader ordered the group carry out the killings, according to Mahmood. 

‘He used to monitor the targets and their movements. He confessed to us that he also helped Ansarullah Bangla Team financially in different ways,’ he said.

ABT’s spiritual leader is currently in jail in connection with the killing of another blogger in 2013.

The other two suspects arrested are Sadek Ali whom police accuse of taking part in both murders and Aminul Mollick, accused of helping ABT members flee the country by making them fake passports.

Bangladesh police last week also arrested two suspected members of the group for the murder of Niloy Chakrabarti, who became the fourth blogger to be killed when he was hacked to death at his home on August 7.

Chakrabarti, who used the pen-name Niloy Neel, had posted on Facebook months before his death that he had been followed by two young men, but police refused to register the complaint and instead told him to leave the country.

The other victim was 27-year-old secular blogger Washiqur Rahman, who was killed in Dhaka four months ago.

Most secular bloggers have gone into hiding, often using pseudonyms in their posts and some have fled abroad.

Police were also investigating claims made by a third party that Al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent was behind the killings. AQIS has already claimed responsibility for Roy’s murder.

In a recent petition to Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, authors including Salman Rushdie and Margaret Atwood called on her government ‘to do all in their power to ensure that the tragic events... are not repeated’.

Bangladesh is an officially secular country, but more than 90 percent of its 160 million people are Muslim.