The slaughter in the street of the Bangladeshi science writer Ananta Bijoy Das by assailants armed with machetes marks the third time this year that an atheist has been murdered in that country for his opinions.
In doing so, the assailants maintain an ancient tradition: the Sunni caliph Mansur founded Baghdad in 672 and left a crypt full of Shia corpses below his palace.
The robbers seized pedestrians and motorists and beat them senseless, telling them they would be shot, have their throats slit, eyes gouged out or be burned alive if they did not comply with their assailants' demands.
Mr Horwell described the victim as a proud man and said there were indications that he had tried to resist his assailants.
At the dawn of the modern age, this great image echoes old depictions of the Temptations of St. Anthony, whose assailants have not gone away after all.
Involving small numbers of assailants and "soft" targets, these are much harder to detect and prevent than elaborate plans to blow up airliners.But preventing them is not impossible indeed European security services frequently do.
In "The Siege" they offer a compelling account told through an impressive range of interviews with surviving victims, officials, relatives of assailants, and other sources both in Pakistan and India.
The ten assailants were from Lashkar-e-Taiba, a jihadist group closely linked to the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), Pakistan's military spy outfit.
Attackers also turn innocent websites and other internet services elsewhere (such as domain-name servers) into unwitting assailants.
As part of the game, the assailants corrupted the source code of a popular equities software program, hacked a system that let them issue fraudulent press releases and mounted DDoS attacks on government networks.
The two assailants rammed their victim with a car before hacking him to death with knives and a cleaver.
