DHAKA: Bangladesh’s High Court on Sunday confirmed two Islamists’ death penalty for the 2013 murder of a blogger, the first of a string of deadly attacks of secular writers and activists, while the country reels from a just ended bloody week-long anti-militancy security clampdown.

Officials said a two-member High Court bench endorsed death penalties of the two and different jail terms for six others, 16 months after a fast-track tribunal originally handed them the sentences for killing Ahmad Rajib Haider.

“The bench upheld the Speedy Trial Tribunal verdict after the analogous hearing of [mandatory] death reference and appeals by the convicts who faced the trial,” a spokesman of attorney general’s office said.

The convicts belonged to banned outfit Ansarullah Bangla Team (ABT), said to be connected to Al Qaida.

The two sentenced to death are students of a private university, Redwanul Azad Rana, Faisal Bin Nayem, alias Dweep, while the six others implicated include the outfit’s so-called spiritual guru Mufti Jashim Uddin Rahmani, who was sentenced to five years of imprisonment for instigating the murder.

ABT is a militant outfit and Daesh-affiliated neo-Jamaatul Muhahideen Bangladesh (neo-JMB) is another. Neo-JMB carried out the July 1, 2016, attack on a Dhaka cafe, which killed 22 people, 17 of whom were foreigners.

Machete-wielding ABT assailants hacked to death 35-year-old Haider, an architect by profession, near his house at Dhaka’s Mirpur area in February 2013.

His murder came only 10 days into the landmark movement at Dhaka’s Shahbagh Square, which demanded the death penalty for the 1971 war criminals and ban on religion-based polices in Bangladesh while the country witnessed the start of trials of the perpetrators of crimes against humanity during the Liberation War.

Investigators earlier said Rahmani’s speeches and books ‘encouraged’ the students to kill ‘atheist bloggers’, which eventually resulted in Haider’s murder while the ABT chief was accused of “instigating” the killing.

Since Haider’s assassination, Bangladesh has witnessed five more murders of secular writers including a progressive publisher.

On February 26, 2015, Bangladesh-born US blogger and science writer Avijit Roy, 42, was attacked just yards away from a book fair in Dhaka; he died on the spot.

A month later fellow blogger Washiqur Rahman, 27, was hacked to death in broad daylight near his home in Dhaka’s Tejgaon area, where the people in the neighbourhood chased down two of the killers and handed them over to the police.

The subsequent victims were Ananta Bijoy Das, 33, a banker and a founder of a group called the Science and Rationalist Council; Niloy Chakrabarti, 40, who wrote online; and publisher Faisal Arefin Dipan, 43, who published a bestselling book by murdered writer Avijit Roy.

Since 2013, Bangladesh has been witnessing a spate of Islamist attacks on foreigners, liberals and members of religious minorities with Daesh and Al Qaida competing for claims.

The government, however, has consistently rejected Daesh and Al Qaida’s claims, ruling out the presence of foreign terrorist groups in Bangladesh and attributing the militant assaults to home-grown outfits such as Neo-JMB or ABT.

Bangladesh banned ABT in 2015, prompting its operatives to regroup under a new banner called Ansar Al Islam, which was also declared outlawed earlier this month and one of its key organisers, a renegade army major, is being looked for by security agencies with a bounty on head.

Officials said sacked major Syed Ziaul Haque was the mastermind of a series of murders of secular writers and bloggers.

But the Sunday’s development in the court came a day after Bangladesh wrapped up a bloody anti-Islamist security clampdown that saw 22 deaths.

The security assaults were carried out against Neo-JMB when seven people including an army lieutenant colonel and two police inspectors lost their lives while the clampdown killed 15 militants and their minor children.

During of the security raids, two militant couples blew themselves up along with four minor children, staging a suicide blast in their home earlier this week.