Bangladeshi police have announced that they have arrested a man in connection to the violent killing of LGBT magazine editor Xulhaz Mannad and LGBTI activist Mahbub Tonoy.

Thirty give year old, Mannan (pictured) was killed by machete wielding attackers in the Bangladeshi capital, Dhaka, late last month.

He was the editor of the country’s first LGBT magazine ‘Roopbaan’.

Mannan was killed alongside LGBTI activist Mahbub Tonoy, 25, who had organised a ‘rainbow rally’, held due Bengali New Year on April 14th.

There murders were part of a series of attacks in recent weeks against intellectuals in the country. Both Mannad and Tonoy worked for aid organisation USAID.

Police have held a media conference announcing that they had arrested one of the six men believed to be behind the brutal attack. Thirty seven year old Shariful Islam Shihab is a member of  Harkatul Jihad, a radical Islamist group banned in Bangladesh.

The arrest comes after an elderly monk, Mawng Shoi Wuu, was found hacked to death in a temple in the Chittagong Hill Tract area of the Bandarban region in the country’s south east.  Three people have also been arrested in relation to that murder.

OIP Staff