Gay rights activist among two hacked to death in Bangladesh

DHAKA, Bangladesh - Two leading gay rights activists were hacked to death Monday at an apartment in Bangladesh's capital, police said, the latest deadly attack on minorities in the Muslim-majority nation.

Dhaka Metropolitan Police spokesman Maruf Hossain Sorder said at least six men entered the seven-story building, saying they were there to deliver a parcel to the home of one of the victims.

"Unidentified attackers entered an apartment at Kalabagan and hacked two people to death by machetes. Another person was injured," he told AFP.

Private station Jamuna TV, quoting witnesses, reported the attackers shouted "Allahu Akbar" (God is the greatest) and fired blanks to create panic as they left.

Police did not identify the victims, but an official from Roopbaan, the country's only LBGT magazine, named one as editor and gay rights activist Xulhaz Mannan.

He also named the other victim as Mahbub Tonoy, who is also gay and on the magazine's executive committee.

Roopbaan has become a platform for promoting the rights of LGBT Bangladeshis, seeking to spread tolerance in a nation where same-sex relationships are a punishable offense.

The US said Mannan had also been working with American development agency USAID in Bangladesh.

"I am devastated by the brutal murder of Xulhaz Mannan and another young Bangladeshi," said US ambassador Marcia Bernicat.

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

Online threats

USAID chief Gayle Smith called for the attackers to be brought to justice, describing Mannan as "the kind of person willing to fight for what he believed in."

Mannan and some of his friends launched Roopbaan two years ago and were behind an annual Rainbow Rally which since 2014 has been held on April 14, Bengali New Year.

Police banned the rally this year as part of widespread security measures, and briefly arrested four LGBT activists after they tried to hold the event anyway.

Ahead of the planned date, Mannan told AFP Islamists had posted threatening messages online.

"They have even set up an online group to threaten us," he said.

The killings come two days after a liberal university professor was hacked to death in the northwestern city of Rajshahi, the latest of several murders of secular bloggers and liberal activists.

The Islamic State group claimed responsibility for the attack, saying the 58-year-old professor who wrote poetry and fiction had been slain for "calling for atheism."

But Bangladesh Home Minister Asaduzzaman Khan rejected the assertion and said "local militants" carried out the murder.

Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina blamed the main opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) and its Islamist ally Jamaat-e-Islami for the killings.

"The BNP-Jamaat nexus has been engaged in such secret and heinous murders in various forms to destabilize the country," state-run BSS news agency reported. "Such killings are being staged in a planned way."

'Staged' killings

Hasina's government has been heavily criticized by rights groups for failing to protect the secular activists and Bangladesh's minorities.

Many secular bloggers have fled the country in recent months after receiving threats.

"There have been four deplorable killings so far this month alone," said Amnesty International South Asia director Champa Patel, in reaction to the latest killings.

"It is shocking that no one has been held to account for these horrific attacks and that almost no protection has been given to threatened members of civil society."

On Monday, Bangladesh's best-known blogger became the latest secular activist to be threatened, a warning 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 he would be killed "very soon."

IS has claimed killing non-Muslims and members of Bangladesh's minorities, while the local branch of Al-Qaeda said it murdered several secular bloggers and activists.

Bangladesh police, however, said they suspect banned local Islamist outfits, the Jamayetul Mujahideen Bangladesh and the Ansarullah Bangla Team, of being behind the killings.

source: interaksyon.com

Scenes of horror as a Paris night becomes a bloodbath

PARIS — The assailants' weapons were those of war: automatic rifles and suicide belts of explosives. The killing was indiscriminate, spread across a swath of the city, in at least six different sites. An ordinary Friday night in Paris transformed into a bloodbath. The word Parisians used over and over as they tried to make sense of the horror was "carnage."

At the packed Bataclan concert hall in eastern Paris, the attackers opened fire on a crowd waiting to hear American rock band Eagles of Death Metal perform. One witness told France Info radio he heard them yell "Allahu Akbar" — God is great in Arabic — as they started their killing spree and took hostages. The city's police chief, Michel Cadot, said the assailants also wore explosive belts, which they detonated.

About a mile (1.5 kilometers) from there, attackers sprayed gunfire at the Belle Equipe bar, busy as ever on a Friday night with patrons unwinding from their week. One witness, also speaking to French radio, said the dead and wounded dropped "like flies" and that "there was blood everywhere. You feel very alone in moments like that."

The preliminary death toll there appeared to be 18 dead, Paris prosecutor Francois Molins said. White sheets were laid over bodies.

To the north, loud explosions reverberated around the national stadium, packed with some 80,000 fans watching France beat Germany in a soccer exhibition match. One of the loud detonations in the chill air so startled French player Patrice Evra that he paused in mid-run, seemingly lost, and kicked away the ball.

A police union official, Gregory Goupil, said the two explosions were suicide attacks and a bombing that killed at least three people — near two of the entrances to the stadium and a McDonalds. The stadium was the first site targeted.


From there, the wave of killings quickly spread.

There were 14 dead on one street, five on another, Molins said. The spread of the killings added to the confusion and made a coherent picture slow to form. But the shock was instantaneous, as was the understanding that this was terror and killing on a scale unseen in Paris since World War II.

"The terrorists, the assassins, sprayed the outsides of several cafes with machine guns and went inside," Cadot, the police chief, said. "So there were victims in terrible and atrocious states in numerous places."

Pierre-Henri Lombard was dining in a restaurant in the trendy neighborhood when he heard sounds like the fireworks for France's Bastille Day national holiday.

Then the panic began.

"Waiters went outside and said it was a shooting. We saw dozens of people rundown the street, a couple were bleeding," he said.

As police, soldiers and the emergency services sprang into action, sirens wailing, helicopters whirring overhead, medical personnel started reporting for work of their own accord to help treat the injured. Five subway lines were shut down entirely, and Paris police told people to stay at home and avoid going out unless absolutely necessary.

At the Bataclan, police launched an assault to free hostages. Haggard-looking survivors were bused away.

At the stadium, fans streamed onto the pitch after the match, preferring the relative safety of inside of the stadium to the chaos outside. Police forensic officers dressed in white scoured the blast sites for evidence.

French President Francois Hollande was quickly evacuated from the stadium and soon after declared a state of emergency.

___

Greg Keller, Samuel Petrequin and Sylvie Corbet contributed to this report.

source: philstar.com