LGBT activist is hacked to death in Dhaka flat
Two people were hacked to death Monday at an apartment in the Bangladesh capital Dhaka, the police said, with a local television channel identifying one of them as a leading gay rights activist.
Two people were hacked to death Monday at an apartment in the Bangladesh capital Dhaka, the police said, with a local television channel identifying one of them as a leading gay rights activist.
“Unidentified attackers entered an apartment at Kalabagan and hacked two people to death. Another person was injured,” Dhaka metropolitan police spokesperson Maruf Hossain Sorder told AFP.
He did not identify the dead, but private television Channel 24 said one of them was the editor of Roopbaan, the country’s only magazine for the LGBT community.
A spokesperson for a gay group, Boys of Bangladesh, confirmed to AFP by text message that the Roopbaan editor was among the dead.
The editor was behind an annual Rainbow Rally, which since 2014 has been held on April 14, Bengali New Year. But the police this year banned the rally as part of widespread security measures. Ahead of the banned rally earlier this month, the editor told AFP that they had received threats from Islamists, who posted messages online. “They have even set up an online group to threaten us,” he said. The death came two days after a liberal professor was hacked to death in the northwestern city of Rajshahi, the latest in a series of murders of secular bloggers and liberal activists that has left the country reeling.
The ISIS group claimed responsibility for the attack through its news agency, saying the 58-year-old professor who wrote poetry and fiction had been murdered for “calling for atheism”. But Bangladesh home minister Asaduzzaman Khan rejected the ISIS assertion and said “local militants” were responsible for the murder.
On Monday, Bangladesh’s best-known blogger said he has become the latest secular activist threatened with murder, a warning which he suspected was linked to his recent scathing criticism of the government.
Blogger Imran Sarker, who led major protests by secular activists in 2013 against Islamist leaders, said he had received a phone call on Sunday warning that he would be killed “very soon”.