Police: Assailants Shouting 'Naraye Takbir, Allahu Akbar’ Stab Two Men to Death in Bangladesh, Including Gay Rights Activist

NEW DELHI (TheBlaze/AP) -- Police in Bangladesh say unidentified assailants shouting "Naraye Takbir, Allahu Akbar" have stabbed two men to death, including a gay rights activist who also worked for the U.S. Agency for International Development.

Mohammed Iqbal, police officer-in-charge in Dhaka's Kalabagan area, identified the activist as Xulhaz Mannan and said he previously worked as a protocol officer for a former U.S. ambassador to Bangladesh. He said the other victim of Monday's attack was a friend of Mannan's named Tanay Majumder.

Iqbal said Mannan was an editor of Bangladesh's first gay rights magazine, Roopbaan.

Mashable:
A senior editor at Bangladesh's first LGBT magazine Roopbaan has been hacked to death in the ... https://t.co/RJ9voWJMcd #tech

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The Dhaka Tribune newspaper reported the alleged killing happened at around 5 p.m. Monday on the second floor of a six-story building in the capital city of Kalabagan.

A security guard at the building, identified by the Dhaka Tribune only as Parvez, said, he heard shouting and shooting, and went to see what was going on. That's when he says the "assailants attacked me with knives."

“I am devastated by the brutal murder of Xulhaz Mannan and another young Bangladeshi,” Marcia Bernicat, the U.S. ambassador to Bangladesh, told the Guardian.

“We abhor this senseless act of violence and urge the government of Bangladesh in the strongest terms to apprehend the criminals behind these murders," Mannan added.

The killings occurred two days after unidentified men hacked to death a university professor in a northwestern city.

The attack was similar to recent killings of atheist bloggers by radical Islamists in Muslim-majority Bangladesh.

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