Hindu man brutally murdered by Muslim men in Dhaka amidst rampant attacks on Hindu minorities in Bangladesh

Case ID : 30a9e32 | Location : Dhaka District, Bangladesh | Date of Incident : Fri, 7 August, 2026

Case ID : 30a9e32

Dhaka District, Bangladesh

7 August, 2026

Hindu man brutally murdered by Muslim men in Dhaka amidst rampant attacks on Hindu minorities in Bangladesh

Attack resulting in death

Attacked for Hindu identity

Case Summary

In the Dhamrai Municipality of Dhaka, Bangladesh, a 30-year-old Hindu man, Shankar Mandal, was brutally assaulted over suspicion of theft by a Muslim man named Wazed Ali and his associates. According to reports, on 8 August 2026, Shankar Mandal was summoned from his home by people associated with rice and paddy trader Wazed Haji after a motorcycle part was reported stolen from Wazed Ali's vehicle, with other reports stating that a motor part had been stolen from his rice mill. Shankar was taken to the mill along with his father, Badan Chandra Mandal, and local resident Ziaur Rahman. According to his father and Ziaur Rahman, the two accompanying men were sent outside while Shankar was taken inside and brtually beaten during questioning. He was subsequently released and was unable to walk properly because of the serious injuries he had sustained. Subsequently, Shankar was taken to Dhamrai Upazila Health Complex in a seriously injured condition, where doctors advised his family to transfer him to Shaheed Suhrawardy Medical College Hospital in Dhaka for advanced treatment. However, his family could not afford the cost of treatment and brought him back home, where he remained in an injured condition. On the morning of 15 August, seven days after the beating, Shankar died at his home. His father and Ziaur Rahman stated that the beating had left him seriously injured and that his inability to receive advanced medical treatment contributed to the circumstances surrounding his death. Furthermore, Wazed Ali and others involved in the incident remained unavailable after the incident, preventing their statements from being obtained. Dhamrai police visited the scene, examined the body and stated that the matter would be investigated and legal action would follow if the family submitted a written complaint regarding the beating.

Why it is Hate Crime ?

This case has been added to the tracker under the primary category - Attack resulting in death. Within this, the subcategory selected for this case is - Attacked for Hindu identity. In several cases, Hindus are attacked merely for their Hindu identity without any perceived provocation. A classic example of this category of religiously motivated hate crime is a murder in 2016. 7 ISIS terrorists were convicted for shooting a school principal in Kanpur because they got ‘triggered’ seeing the Kalava on his wrist and tilak that he had put. In this, the Hindu victim had offered no provocation except for his Hindu religious identity. The motivation for the murder was purely religious, driven by religious supremacy. Such cases where Hindus are targeted merely for their religious identity would be documented as a hate crime. Under this category, cases where the attack led to the death of the Hindu victim/s would be documented. In this case, a Hindu man, Shankar Mandal, was brutally beaten by Wazed Ali and his associates after being summoned to a rice mill in Dhamrai, Dhaka, on suspicion of theft and died seven days later from his injured condition. Shankar was taken to the mill along with his father, Badan Chandra Mandal, and local resident Ziaur Rahman. His father and the accompanying witness stated that they were sent outside while Shankar was taken inside and beaten during questioning. He was subsequently released in a seriously injured condition and was unable to walk properly, and subsequently died at home on 15 August 2026. While the available reports did not record an explicit religious slur or statement demonstrating that Shankar was attacked because he was Hindu, the victim's Hindu identity remained relevant in assessing the incident within the broader environment of insecurity and violence affecting vulnerable Hindu minorities in Bangladesh. The Hinduphobia Tracker therefore treated the case as potentially faith-targeted in the context of the wider pattern of attacks and insecurity experienced by Hindus, while remaining open to revision if a credible investigation established that the incident was exclusively motivated by a non-religious criminal or personal dispute. The circumstances of the assault also demonstrated an unlawful and disproportionate use of violence against a Hindu victim. Shankar had been summoned merely on suspicion of involvement in a theft. Instead of referring the matter to the police and allowing the alleged theft to be investigated through established legal procedures, those who took him to the rice mill subjected him to a severe physical assault. The fact that his father and another local resident were sent outside before Shankar was beaten inside the premises further raised concerns about the manner in which the interrogation was conducted. Even if the theft suspicion had been genuine, the accused could have approached the police and allowed the allegation to be investigated through due process rather than resorting to brutal violence and taking the law into their own hands. The subsequent death of Shankar intensified concerns within the Hindu community. The Hinduphobia Tracker has documented multiple cases in which Muslim perpetrators assaulted Hindu victims, and in several instances caused their deaths, following accusations of petty theft or other minor offences. These cases reflect a recurring pattern in which relatively minor allegations escalated into severe and disproportionate violence against Hindu victims. Such incidents can reflect the wider atmosphere of animosity towards Hindus, particularly when Hindu victims are subjected to severe collective violence over comparatively minor accusations. The circumstances of victim's death therefore raised a serious communal concern, even though the available material did not by itself establish a religious motive. This incident must also be viewed against the broader context in which crimes involving Hindu victims in Bangladesh can initially be presented as theft-related, personal, or locally motivated incidents without the possibility of religious hostility being fully examined. The absence of an explicit religious motive in the initial reporting did not, in itself, eliminate the relevance of Shankar's Hindu identity, particularly given the wider insecurity experienced by the Hindu minority. At the same time, the available evidence did not establish that the theft accusation itself was fabricated because of Shankar's religion or that the perpetrators explicitly targeted him for being Hindu. Given the serious assault, the death of a Hindu victim following the violence, the resort to extrajudicial punishment instead of lawful investigation, and the broader environment of insecurity affecting Hindu minorities in Bangladesh, the case met the threshold for inclusion in the Hinduphobia Tracker's hate crime database. Disclaimer: The Hinduphobia Tracker acknowledges that multiple perpetrators were to have been involved in the assault. However, only Wazed Ali was explicitly identified in the available reports. Accordingly, the perpetrator count has been recorded as 1.