Unidentified attackers hacked to death a university professor in Bangladesh on Saturday, police said, adding that the assault bore the hallmarks of previous killings by Islamist militants of secular and atheist activists.

Police said English professor Rezaul Karim Siddique, 58, was hacked from behind with machetes as he walked to the bus station from his home in the country's northwestern city of Rajshahi, where he taught at the city's public university.

Thousands of Bangladeshi villagers clashed on Monday with members of a minority Islamic group who are often regarded with suspicion, leaving two dead people and scores injured, an official said.

Villagers rallied in the southern coastal district of Noakhali to demand a halt to construction of a local Hizbut Tauhid mosque, executive magistrate M. Nikaruzzaman told AFP.

Bangladesh opposition chief Khaleda Zia was ordered Monday to appear in court to answer a sedition charge, in another blow to the beleaguered former premier which will likely anger her supporters.

The Chief Metropolitan Magistrate's Court accepted a case filed against the 70-year-old for questioning the official number of deaths during Bangladesh's war of independence against Pakistan in 1971.

Two suspected followers of a banned Bangladeshi Islamist outfit were killed Monday in an explosion outside the capital Dhaka as security forces raided a third extremist hideout in four days.

The Rapid Action Battalion launched the raid on an abandoned house at Gazipur, 40 kilometers (25 miles) north of Dhaka, just after midnight, said a spokesman for the elite police unit.

Bangladesh police have arrested a human trafficking "godfather" in a fresh crackdown on smugglers amid fears of a resumption of the racket that sparked a regional migrant crisis earlier this year, an officer said Thursday.

Police have arrested at least 20 traffickers in the past month including alleged kingpin Dil Mohammad on the weekend in the southern smuggling town of Teknaf bordering Myanmar.

Bangladesh's elite security force on Thursday arrested the head of a banned hardline Islamist group over the murders of two atheist bloggers that has sparked an international outcry.

The Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) arrested Mohammad Abul Bashar, head of an Islamic group called Ansarullah Bangla Team (ABT) which was banned in May over a series of blogger killings.

A key suspect wanted over the bombing of a Bangkok shrine that left 20 people dead flew to Dhaka a day before the blast before traveling on to China, Bangladesh police said Thursday.

"We got a message from Thai police that Bangkok blast suspect Abudureheman Abdusataer, also known as Izan, came to Bangladesh. He was traveling on a Chinese passport," national police spokesman Nazrul Islam told AFP. 

Two men were slaughtered inside an Islamic Sufi shrine in the Bangladesh port city of Chittagong on Friday in an attack police said was carried out by a "trained and unknown assassin."

The murderer escaped after slitting the throats of the shrine's head custodian and his assistant in the neighborhood of Bayezid Bostami, Chittagong police commissioner Abdul Jalil Mondal told AFP.

Bangladesh police Tuesday charged five suspected Islamist militants with murder over the killing of an atheist blogger, one of four secular writers hacked to death this year for writing against fundamentalists.

Police brought the charges -- the first in any of the four murders this year -- in a Dhaka magistrates court, which will now decide whether to open a trial or order further investigations.

As thousands of Bangladeshis and Indians celebrated the end of one of the world's most intractable border disputes, Fatema Khatun was quietly hopeful of finally seeing justice.

Fifteen years after Khatun's husband, Badshah Mia, was hacked to death and his body dumped on a canal bank near their home along the border, no one has been charged with his murder.