Dhaka: A 62-year-old Hindu, who worked in an ashram, was hacked to death in Bangladesh on Friday.

This was the latest in a series of attacks on religious minorities in the mainly Muslim country, police said.

Nityaranjan Pande was on his regular morning walk when unidentified attackers set upon him, killing him on the spot.

Pandey was killed near the Thakur Anukul Chandra Satsanga Paramtirtha Hemayetpurdham Ashram where had worked for the past 40 years. In recent years he was the head of its office staff.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the murder.

“As a diabetic, everyday he walks early in the morning. Today as he was walking, several attackers hacked him in the neck… He died on the spot,” local police station chief Abdullah Al-Hasan said.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility.

But the police chief in the northwestern district of Pabna where the ashram is located said the killing bore the hallmarks of recent attacks by Islamist extremists on minorities and secular activists.

“There was no eye-witness to the attack as it happened very early in the morning,” he added.

Bangladesh is reeling from a wave of murders of secular and liberal activists and religious minorities that have left nearly 50 people dead in the last three years.

Most of the latest attacks have been claimed either by ISIS or by a South Asian branch of Al-Qaeda.

Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s government has however blamed homegrown Islamists for the attacks, rejecting claims of responsibility from IS and Al-Qaeda.

Experts say a government crackdown on opponents, including a ban on Bangladesh’s largest Islamist party Jamaat-e-Islami following a protracted political crisis, has pushed many toward extremism.

Victims of the attacks by suspected Islamists have included secular bloggers, gay rights activists and followers of minority religions.

Although it is officially secular, around 90 percent of Bangladesh’s 160 million-strong population is Muslim. Some 8 percent of the population is Hindu.

This is the second such murder within three days. Only on June 7, a Hindu priest was hacked to death by three suspected Islamic State jihadists, who nearly severed his head.

On Sunday, a Christian businessman was hacked to death by machete-wielding men near a church, hours after the wife of a top anti-terror police officer was shot dead by religious extremists.

In February, militants stabbed to death a Hindu priest at a temple in Bangladesh and shot and wounded a devotee who went to his aid.

In April, a liberal professor was hacked to death by machete-wielding IS militants who slit his throat near his home in Rajshahi city. In the same month, a Hindu tailor was hacked to death by IS militants in his shop and Bangladesh’s first gay magazine editor was murdered along with a friend in his flat in Dhaka by Islamists.

The IS and al-Qaeda in Indian Peninsula have claimed responsibility for some of the attacks although the government denies their presence in Bangladesh.