DHAKA: A Bangladesh court on Thursday sentenced two men to death for the murder of an atheist blogger in 2013, the first time anyone has been punished after a series of such killings.

A total of eight people were convicted by the fast-track court in Dhaka of involvement in the slaying of Ahmed Rajib Haider, an architect who had campaigned against the Jamaat-e-Islami party which opposed Bangladesh’s independence from Pakistan in 1971.

Besides the two former students of a prominent private university who were given the death sentence, Judge Sayeed Ahmed sentenced another student to life in prison and gave a leader of the banned Ansarullah Bangla group a five-year jail term.

He sentenced three more students to 10 years in jail and another to three years in jail.

Haider was hacked to death by machete-wielding attackers in February 2013 near his home in Dhaka’s Mirpur area. Five more secular bloggers and a publisher were killed this year, triggering claims by activists that the government is not doing enough to protect secular writers.

One of the two students given the death sentence is on the run and he was tried and sentenced in absentia.

All the convicted students said they were radicalised by the sermons of Mufti Jasimuddin Rahmani, a former imam of a mosque in Dhaka’s Mohammadpur area. He is known to be the head of the banned Ansarullah Bangla.

Haider had criticised the Prophet Mohammed and Islam in his blog. He demanded that the authorities should ban the Jamaat-e-Islami for its alleged involvement in genocide in 1971.

The blogger’s father rejected the verdict and said the defendants should all have been given the death sentence.