Gay Rights Activists Hacked To Death In Bangladesh

e99305dc122f4cf5abd471bed4fb0404_18

Two people, including the editor of a magazine for the transgender community, have been hacked to death in the capital of Bangladesh. A third person, a security guard at the apartment building where the killings took place, was seriously wounded in Monday’s attack in Dhaka, in which six attackers murdered Julhas Mannan and Tanay Mojumdar.

Mannan was the editor of Rupban, the only LGBT magazine in the country. “Unidentified attackers entered an apartment at Kalabagan and hacked two people to death,” Maruf Hossain Sarder, a Dhaka Metropolitan Police spokesman, told the AFP news agency. Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina Hasina vowed to hunt down and prosecute those responsible.

She accused the country’s opposition party and what she called allied armed groups of being behind the killings. The opposition has denied the allegations. No suspects have been arrested, police officer Shamim Ahmed told the Associated Press news agency. Mannan’s magazine, Roopbaan, was launched two years ago and has become a platform for promoting the rights of LGBT people in Bangladesh, where homosexual acts are illegal.

The group also runs an annual Rainbow Rally on April 14, Bengali new year, that was cancelled this year as part of widespread security measures imposed by police. The incident came two days after a university professor was killed in similar fashion in an attack in Rajshahi, which was claimed by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, or ISIS) group.