‘Receive regular threats’: Says coordinator of AL web team who survived machete attack in 2013

“Let us come to power, we’ll ensure a disgraceful and painful death,” Engr Tonmoy Ahmed, coordinator of Awami League’s web team, cited threats made against him during a Facebook live recently.

Tonmoy mentioned that M Rahman Masum, known as a “pro BNP-Jamaat” social media content creator, even warned of staging a “March 25, 1971-like dark night.”

Tonmoy said, “I regularly receive such threats. At times these radicals threaten me in private messages as well.”

In August 2013, a decade back, a group of men – reportedly activists of Shibir (student front of Jamaat-e-Islami) – armed with machetes, hacked him indiscriminately when he was at his village home to celebrate Eid.

Tonmoy says he came under attack for his stance as an anti-war crimes campaigner and for resisting jihadist propaganda online.

Now living with over 130 stitches on his body, Tonmoy, also a former general secretary of BUET Chhatra League, claimed he had received threats over phone from Shibir activists.

Tonmoy survived a machete attack in 2013. Photo: collected

“As I recovered and got involved with the party’s social media platforms, I had to face a series of disinformation campaign and slander from opposition activists against me over the span of last couple of years,” added Tonmoy.

He also recalled an earlier attempt to label him a “Shibir activist who had intruded the AL,” which was unsubstantiated and fell flat.

Tonmoy has rolled out a series of training sessions to help party activists to enable them to counter “disinformation peddled ceaselessly against the party.”