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DHAKA. — Bangladesh police arrested an Islamist student yesterday over the hacking to death of a professor one day earlier, the latest such killing claimed by the Islamic State group.

Attackers wielding machetes almost beheaded English professor Rezaul Karim Siddique on Saturday in the north-western city of Rajshahi, following a string of similar killings of secular activists by Islamist militants.

The 58-year-old was murdered as he walked to the bus station from his home.

The student from Rajshahi University where Siddique taught was arrested early yesterday for questioning, although the hunt was still on for other suspects, said the city’s deputy police commissioner Nahidul Islam.

He said the unidentified student of public administration is a member of Islami Chhatra Shibir, the student wing of Bangladesh’s largest Islamist opposition party the Jamaat-e-Islami.

“We have detained a 21-year-old Rajshahi University student who is a Shibir member as a suspect over the murder,” Islam told AFP, without detailing his alleged role in the attack.

Siddique was the fourth professor from Rajshahi University to be killed by suspected Islamists in recent years.

Five secular bloggers and a publisher have also been murdered, as well as members of minority groups and foreigners, as Bangladesh reels from rising Islamist violence.

Police said that in each of the attacks on the bloggers and online activists, attackers hacked the victim to death with machetes or cleavers. — AFP.