The Director-General of UNESCO, Audrey Azoulay, today condemned the murder of book and magazine publisher Shahjahan Bachchu in Munshiganj district in central Bangladesh on 11 June.

“I condemn the killing of Shahjahan Bachchu,” said the Director-General. “The assassination of people who stimulate creative debate is a loss for society as a whole and I call on the authorities to spare no effort in bringing to trial those responsible for this crime.”

Bachchu, a promoter of secularism, was shot in the village of Kakaldi, near Dhaka. The editor of weekly newspaper Amader Bikrampur, Bachchu was also a blogger, a writer and poet. A former head of his district’s Communist Party of Bangladesh, he owned the Bishakha Prokashoni publishing company.

UNESCO promotes the safety of journalists through global awareness-raising, capacity-building and a range of actions, notably the UN Plan of Action on the Safety of Journalists and the Issue of Impunity.

See also: UNESCO condemns the killing of journalists.

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Media contact: Sylvie Coudray, s.coudray@unesco.org, +33 (0)1 45 68 08 91