Walter William Rosario, a 40-year-old priest and headmaster of a Catholic school, went missing on Monday in a village in northern Bangladesh where suspected Islamist extremists last year hacked a Catholic grocer to death.
Gerves Rosario, bishop of the nearby city of Rajshahi, said he believed the priest had been kidnapped and that Catholics in the region were deeply worried.
“He was organising for around 300 Catholics to travel to Dhaka to see the Pope and attend his holy mass. But his disappearance has marred their joy. They don’t want to go to Dhaka any more,” he said.
News of his disappearance comes as Bangladesh tightens security in the capital Dhaka ahead of the arrival today of the first pontiff to visit Bangladesh in more than three decades.
Police in Natore district said they had launched a major search for Rosario after his family reported him missing.
“He has been missing since late Monday. His mobile has been switched off,” local police chief Biplob Bijoy Talukder said.
The family received a phone call from someone using the missing man’s number to demand a ransom, but Talukder said police believed this was a hoax.
They have not ruled out the possibility he was abducted by Islamist extremists, who have carried out attacks on religious minorities in the region in the past four years.
Since 2015 at least three Christians, including two converts from Islam, have been hacked to death in attacks blamed on the militant Jamaatul Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB).
Bikash Hubert Rebeiro, the priest in Bonpara village where Rosario grew up, described him as a “good man” whose disappearance had cast a pall over the Pope’s visit.
“Our joy is gone,” he told AFP by phone. “Everyone in the village is shocked. His elderly mother has being crying non-stop.”
Rebeiro said Rosario’s family was friendly with the relatives of Sunil Gomes, the Catholic grocer murdered outside his shop last year.
Christians make up less than 0.5% of Bangladesh’s 160mn people and have for centuries lived in harmony alongside the Muslim majority. But community leaders say a rise in Islamist extremism has strained relations.
Bangladesh authorities have escalated security in Christian areas of Dhaka in recent days as tens of thousands descend on the capital for an open-air mass tomorrow.
On Tuesday police said they had killed three suspected Islamist militants in a raid on a house where they found hand grenades, pistols and bomb-making materials.
“The Pope’s visit is a matter of honour for us. We are organising the highest level of security for him,” police spokeswoman Sahely Ferdous said.
The three-day visit will be dominated by the plight of more than 620,000 Rohingya Muslims who have fled ethnic unrest in Myanmar and taken refuge in Bangladesh.
Their arrival has added to the huge challenges already facing the poor, overpopulated country, which has seen a substantial rise in Islamist extremism in
recent years.
In July last year Islamist militants stormed a Dhaka cafe and massacred 22 hostages including 18 foreigners in an attack claimed by the Islamic State group.
The government has denied the international group’s involvement. Since the attack, security forces have killed more than 70 alleged militants in a crackdown condemned by rights activists and opposition parties.
A Bangladeshi policeman stands guard along a road near the Bangabandhu memorial museum ahead of Pope’s Francis visit, in Dhaka yesterday. Pope Francis’ schedule in Bangladesh will not include a visit to the vast refugee camp but he is due to meet with a small group of Rohingya in Dhaka.
