Editor Of LGBT Magazine And Friend Killed In Bangladesh

By Countercurrents.org

26 April, 2016
Countercurrents.org

Xulhaz Mannan, an editor at LGBT magazine Roopbaan, was killed alongside another victim, when unidentified attackers came to their apartment in Dhaka yesterday, posing as couriers. Another person was also injured in the attack

The killings come just two days after a university professor, 58-year-old Rezaul Karim Siddique, was hacked to death near his home in the northern Bangladesh district of Rajshahi, on his way to the city’s public university where he taught.

Earlier this month Nazimuddin Samad, a Bangladeshi law student who had expressed secular views online, died when he was attacked with machetes and then shot in the capital, Dhaka.

Last year, suspected militants killed five secular writers including Avijit Roy, a U.S. citizen of Bangladeshi origin and his publisher Faisal Arefin Dipan.

Avijit Roy was hacked to death near a book fair in the capital Dhaka in February last year — the first in a series of attacks that targeted atheist and secular bloggers in Bangladesh. Avijit Roy was a also a prolific writer and had penned down a dozen books, mostly about science, philosophy and materialism. His last books Obisshahser Dorshon (The Philosophy of Disbelief) and Biswasher Virus (The Virus of Faith), were well received around the world. In the Virus of Faith his main argument was that "faith-based terrorism will wreak havoc on society in epidemic proportions". He also edited a popular blog Mukto-Mona.