The Catholic editor of a Bangladeshi newsletter critical of the government has fled to the US in fear of her life, the Catholic News Service (CNS) reported.
Rosaline Costa, 67, has for 30 years been editor of Hotline Bangladesh, a monthly publication which chronicles corruption, crime, terror and religious violence in the country.
Now living in New York City, Costa is reported to be working out how to keep the newsletter going remotely.
Since July, Costa has been staying with two nephews and a niece, both of whom themselves left Bangladesh after threats and harassment.
The journalist told the CNS that her niece's Muslim uncle was trying to force her into marrying him, and that one nephew was taken to a mosque and told to convert to Islam under fear of death.
The other nephew, an art student, was followed by Muslims and told to convert and then join in trying to recruit others to Islam. Costa said: "After that, I did not allow him to go to the university any more for classes".
Bangladesh has seen a rise in religious violence in recent years.
Recently, Islamist terrorists have been stepping up their persecution of Christians in Bangladesh after a rapid rise in converts.
In July, more than 20 people were murdered in an Islamist terror attack on a restaurant in the diplomatic zone in Dhaka, the country's capital.
That month, new figures showed numbers of Muslims converting to Christianity in Bangladesh are on the rise. The human rights organisation Christian Freedom International reports that there is a growing number of Muslims who have been pledging their lives to Christ. It is estimated that as many as 91,000 Muslims all across Bangladesh have converted to Christianity in just six years, in spite of knowing it could cost them their lives
In May an Italian priest was shot in Dhaka.
An Italian aid worker was shot dead in Dhaka in September and a Japanese farmer was killed in the north of Bangladesh days later. Both attacks were carried out by three gunmen riding a motorcycle and have been claimed by ISIS. The Government of Muslim-majority Bangladesh reject the claims, insisting that there is no ISIS presence in the country.
Costa said "I made several editorials in the newsletter" about religious violence, adding: "In the last two and a half months I could not go out of the house."
She told of a woman who had been attacked with a knife and badly beaten. "But she would not let me visit her in the hospital," Costa said. "She did not want to be identified. Second, she feared for my safety."
The editor added that he had received a series of anonymous phone calls, but that the police refused to act. "I went to the police and they did not want to take a report," she told CNS.
Asked if she felt she might never be able to return to her country, Costa said, "I don't want to go back" in the present circumstances.
More than 163 million people live in Bangladesh, where nine in ten are Muslim. There are fewer than 830,000 Christians and Islam is the state religion.
