DHAKA: Dhaka vowed Saturday to hunt down the killers of secular blogger Niloy Chakrabarti who became the fourth such writer to be murdered in Bangladesh by suspected militants this year.

Home Minister Asaduzzaman Khan said the nation’s intelligence agencies went straight to work after a gang of machete-armed attackers hacked the blogger to death at his home in the capital on Friday.

“We hope we’ll catch the killers soon. They’ll be hunted down,” the minister told AFP, adding that the perpetrators appeared to have been well-prepared for the assault.

Police confirmed Chakrabarti, 30, was murdered at his home in the capital’s Goran neighborhood by a group of four people who had pretended to look for a place to rent.

Asha Moni, wife of the slain blogger, later told reporters that one of the men attacked her husband shouting “Allahu Akbar (God is greatest).”

She has filed a murder case against “four unidentified attackers” over the killing, local police chief Mustafiz Bhuiyan told AFP.

The Bangladesh branch of Al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent (AQIS), Ansar Al-Islam, claimed the murder and warned of more to come, according to monitoring group SITE.

Chakrabarti is the fourth secular blogger to be killed in the Muslim-majority nation since February, when Bangladeshi-born US citizen Avijit Roy was hacked to death in Dhaka.

Nur Alam, assistant police commissioner in Dhaka, said the killing bore the hallmarks of other bloggers’ murders.

“It seems that it (murder) was carried out by an extremist group,” he told AFP.

Forensic expert Habibuzzaman Chowdhury, who conducted the autopsy on Chakrabarti, told reporters that multiple attackers had hacked him at least 12 times.

The latest killing sparked outrage as hundreds of secular activists joined protests, decrying a culture of impunity in the country.