Ansarullah chief Rahmani out on bail

Mufti Jashimuddin Rahmani, chief of the banned militant outfit Ansarullah Bangla Team, was released on bail from Kashimpur High-Security Central Jail in Gazipur this morning.
Rahmani walked out of the jail around 11:15am, Deputy Jailer Rezaul Karim told our Gazipur correspondent.
He was sentenced to five years in jail in 2015 for provoking blogger Ahmed Rajib Haider’s murder through his sermons.
Deputy Jailer Md Farhad Sarkar said that there were four cases against Rahmani. He was released as there was no objection from the court and prison authorities, he added.
Rajib, a blogger and activist of the Shahbagh movement, was hacked to death on February 15, 2013, near his house in the capital’s Mirpur. He was the first victim of a series of similar deadly attacks on secular writers and bloggers at that time.
A Dhaka court handed down the death penalty to two people, life-term imprisonment to another, and five-year imprisonment to Rahmani on December 31, 2015, in a case over Rajib’s murder.
The convicts other than Rahmani had vowed to kill “atheist bloggers” after reading Rahmani’s books and listening to his sermons, the investigation officer said in the charge sheet. They targeted Rajib “for his blog posts under the nick of Thabababa” and carried out the murder in two separate groups.