Story highlights Bangladeshi-American blogger Avijit Roy was killed Thursday Frida Ghitis: Root cause of Islamist extremism is not poverty

Roy and his wife, Rafida Ahmed Bonya, now in critical condition after also being attacked Thursday, were in Bangladesh to attend the national book fair, where Roy was promoting his books advocating tolerance, education and secular humanism.

Frida Ghitis

Why was he killed? At the time of writing, the perpetrators had not been caught, but there seems little doubt he was killed by Islamist radicals, who were likely angered by his devastatingly critical writings. Just last month he wrote about the Charlie Hebdo killings in Paris and the December 16 massacre in Peshawar, Pakistan, in which Pakistani Taliban opened fire inside a school, killing 145 people, including 132 children. "To me," he wrote, "such religious extremism is like a highly contagious virus."

Roy strongly disagreed with President Barack Obama's statements distancing the so-called Islamic State from Islam. "ISIS," he said, "is what unfolds when the virus of faith launches into action and the outbreak becomes an epidemic."

His assassination came the same day we learned the identity of the man known as Jihadi John, infamous for narrating in English as Western hostages of ISIS were decapitated. He has been identified as the London-raised, university educated Mohammed Emwazi.

Taken together, these two tragedies help shed light on what motivates people to conduct these brutal acts.

The revelations about Emwazi's life story were pieced together with the help of an organization that wants to make us believe Jihadi John's radicalization is the fault of the British security services, not of a murderous, apocalyptic ideology that helped make 2014 the deadliest year for terrorist attacks on record.

According to the Washington Post, which relies partly on information from a group called CAGE, Emwazi was described by some as a perfectly normal young Londoner, showing no signs of becoming the barbaric murderer he is alleged to have become, until security services started harassing him. The problems began, friends referred to in the article would have us believe, when he tried to go on safari to Tanzania with a couple of friends. He was stopped in Tanzania, and according to the article, he claims he was accused of planning to travel to Somalia, where the al Qaeda affiliate al Shabaab has been conducting its reign of terror.

An official from CAGE, which is described by the Washington Post as a "rights group," described Emwazi as "extremely kind, extremely gentle," before Britain's MI5 started making his life hell for no apparent reason other than that he was a Muslim.

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'Apocalyptic ideology' to blame?