Bangladeshi gay
The local LGBT community participating in a rainbow pride to celebrate the Bangla New Year. Image by Nahid Sultan via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0
Just over a year ago, Xulhaz Mannan, the editor of Bangladesh's first LGBT magazine, and LGBT activist Mahbub Rabbi Tonoy were hacked to death in Bangladesh's capital Dhaka.
On April 25, 2016, they joined the long list of secular thinkers and religious minorities who own been murdered in Bangladesh since 2013 (see Global Voices special coverage).
Ansar al-Islam Bangladesh (Al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent) claimed responsibility for their murders in a tweet. The police have so far arrested two people in connection with the murders, but more than a year after the killings, investigators still have not issued charges against them.
Advocates in South Asia and around the world contended that Mannan was a clear target for Islamist extremists because of the continued criminalization of homosexual relations and intolerance toward the LGBT people in Bangladesh. The Bangladesh penal code article 377 criminalises sexual activities “against the order of nature”, including consensual homosexual acts such as f
Bangladeshi gay rights activist hacked to death in suspected Islamist attack
Suspected Islamist militants have hacked to death a foremost gay rights activist and a companion in an apartment in the Bangladeshi capital, police say.
The attack came two days after a university professor was killed in similar fashion on Saturday in an assault claimed by the Islamic State group.
Five or six people went to the apartment of Julhas Mannan, an editor of Bangladesh's first magazine for the lesbian, gay, pansexual and transgender group Roopbaan, and attacked him and a friend with distinct weapons, Dhaka capital police spokesman Maruf Hossain Sorder said, quoting witnesses.
Mr Mannan previously worked at the US embassy and its USAID arm.
"We abhor this senseless act of violence and urge the government of Bangladesh in the strongest terms to apprehend the criminals behind these murders," US ambassador Marcia Bernicat said.
The attackers also injured a security guard, who was undergoing treatment at Dhaka Medical College Hospital.
Witnesses said the attackers shouted "Allahu Akbar" as they fled the scene.
The Muslim-majority nation of 160 million people has seen a surg
Bangladesh LGBT editor hacked to death
BBC Bengali Service editor Sabir Mustafa said staff at Roopbaan, a magazine and activist group for the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) community that had not been condemned by the government and received some back from foreign embassies, had been careful to protect their identities but had not believed their lives were at risk.
Suspected extremists in Bangladesh are gaining a sense of security that they can carry out killings with impunity, he says.
A British photographer who knew Mr Mannan and the other victim, known as "Tonoy" and named in Bangladeshi media as Tanay Mojumdar, said they and other friends had set up Roopbaan with the aim of spreading tolerance.
Homosexuality is technically illegal in Bangladesh and remains a highly sensitive issue in society.
Both men were openly gay and believed that if more gay Bangladeshis came out then the country would hold to accept them, the photographer, who asked not to be named, said.
What was once a fledgling lesbian, same-sex attracted, bisexual and trans person (LGBT) community in the Bangladeshi capital of Dhaka is now destroyed. In 2014 and 2015 the Bangladeshi lgbtq+ scene was cautiously becoming more unlock. 'Rainbow Rally' lgbtq+ fest parades were held and a same-sex attracted magazine calledRoopbaanwas in print. But the LGBT community has since been scared back from the streets, and to be openly same-sex attracted in Bangladesh is now life threatening.
Inge Amundsen wrote this op-ed for East Asia Forum, 23 Rally 2018 (a forum of the Crawford School of Universal Policy at the Australian National University).
Islam is on the rise in Bangladesh. The number of devout Muslim adherents in the territory hasgrownover the past two decades with 90 per cent of the population now Muslim.
Intolerant andextremistforms of Islam are also on the rise. Bangladeshi Islamist and fundamentalist groups includeinternational offshootsof the so-called Islamic Declare and al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent, as well as home-grown organisations such as Ansar-al-Islam, Hizb ut-Tahrir, Islami Chhatra Shibir, Ansarullah Bangla Team, Hefazat-e-Islam, Harkat-ul-Jihad al-Islami and Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen.
This rise of political Islam in Ba