Gay community in noakhali, bangladesh

Last month, unknown assailants hacked two gay activists to death in an apartment in Bangladesh's capital, Dhaka. One of the victims, Xulhaz Mannan, edited the first magazine for the country's gay and lesbian community; the other, Mahbub Tonoy, was a gay rights activist. While an Islamist group claimed responsibility for the killings, Bangladesh's interior minister laid the blame on the victims themselves - homosexuality is a criminal offense in the country. In an interview with DW, Riamoni Chisty, a year-old gay activist who recently fled Bangladesh for Germany after repeated attacks, speaks about the contempt the lesbian, gay, biseuxual and transexual LGBT community endures in the South Asian country.

In April , the police found the bodies of Xulhaz Mannan and Tonoy Mahbub, two prominent LGBT rights activists, in an apartment in Dhaka, the Bangladesh capital. This week, police arrested one of the main suspects in the murder, stating that the killers had plotted the attack over the past six months. He was a visible and openly gay human rights activist who supported and protected gay and trans people even in the face of threats against the community. His close friend Mahbub was also an openly queer activist.

This provision carries a maximum penalty of life imprisonment. Only men are criminalised under this law. The Penal Code was inherited from the British during the colonial period, in which the English criminal law was imposed upon Bangladesh. Bangladesh retained the law upon independence and continues to criminalise same-sex sexual activity today.

What was once a fledgling lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender LGBT community in the Bangladeshi capital of Dhaka is now destroyed. In and the Bangladeshi gay scene was cautiously becoming more open. But the LGBT community has since been scared back from the streets, and to be openly gay in Bangladesh is now life threatening. Inge Amundsen wrote this op-ed for East Asia Forum , 23 March a forum of the Crawford School of Public Policy at the Australian National University.