The IHEU reports another freethinker slaughtered.

Yameen Rasheed (29) was well-known in the Maldives as a satirist, taking shots at the government, or at Islamist radicals, all the time promoting the values of secularism and democracy that he obviously held dear.

He was found dead in the early hours of Sunday morning, stabbed to death in the stairwell of his apartment.

The IHEU met Yameen Rasheed earlier this year, during his visit to the Human Rights Council with Forum Asia. He spoke on a panel with Rafida Bonya Ahmed, who herself survived a machete attack in 2015 during which her husband Avijit Roy was killed.

IHEU Director of Advocacy, Elizabeth’s O’Casey, kept in touch with Rasheed after meeting him at the event. Rasheed updated the IHEU on death threats against himself and other secularists, and IHEU raised his case with Ahmed Shaheed (the UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion or Belief).

“I have just heard the horrific news that the world has lost an incredibly intelligent, articulate, kind and courageous man: Yameen Rasheed. I liked him enormously, although I did not know him well enough – to my eternal regret,” said Elizabeth O’Casey today. “And he has now been brutally murdered. And the secularist human rights community has lost yet another light, another blogger and activist, and the world is darker because of it.”

The IHEU joins Forum Asia and PEN International in calling for a full, transparent, impartial investigation, and supports the call by opposition figures for international involvement in the inquiry.

This god hides from us, but wants us murdered if we don’t believe it exists. Could there be anything more tyrannical?