In her first extensive interview taken by Reuters since the attack that killed her husband Avijit Roy, Rafida Ahmed Bonya criticised the Bangladeshi government for not responding more aggressively to her husband’s slaying.
“This was well planned, choreographed – a global act of terrorism,” she said. “But what almost bothers me more is that no one from the Bangladesh government has reached out to me. It’s as if I don’t exist, and they are afraid of the extremists.
“Is Bangladesh going to be the next Pakistan or Afghanistan?”
In an interview, Sajeeb Wazed, the son of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, said his mother offered private condolences to Roy’s father. But the political situation in Bangladesh was too volatile for her to comment publicly, he said.
“We don’t want to be seen as atheists. It doesn’t change our core beliefs. We believe in secularism,” he said. “But given that our opposition party plays that religion card against us relentlessly, we can’t come out strongly for him. It’s about perception, not about reality.”
Agents from the US Federal Bureau of Investigation met most recently with Bonya in the United States on Friday, Bonya said.
In 2002, while in Singapore, Roy noticed a blog post from a US woman who wrote of religion: “I don’t understand how people can believe in fairy tales.” It was Rafida Ahmed, who would become his wife.
“A lot of people attacked me online for that post,” she recalled. “I was a tech manager in Atlanta at the time, a single mother. I was intimidated and didn’t respond. The next day, someone named Avijit Roy was defending me.”
They dated long distance for years, and he reluctantly moved from Singapore to Atlanta in 2006: Bonya would not leave the US until her daughter Trisha Ahmed completed high school. Roy held a doctorate in biomedical research, but found it easier to get a lucrative job and a US visa as a software architect, his wife said.
After Trisha was in college, the couple, by then married and US citizens, decided to visit Dhaka. The two departed in mid-February.
“We knew that anything can happen in a country like that, and we took precautions,” Bonya said. “There was only one threat against him but we didn’t take it seriously. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have gone.”
“We were really, really happy,” said Bonya, who had edited her husband’s books in Atlanta, but had not seen his influence first-hand in Bangladesh. “He had finally gotten to show me – in Bangladesh – how and why his work was so important.
“This looks much scarier than we originally thought,” Bonya said about how things are panning out.