A U.S. Embassy worker was among two men hacked to death Monday evening in Dhaka, Bangladesh’s capital, the embassy said in a Facebook statement.
The statement identified the embassy worker as Xulhaz Mannan, calling him a “dear friend.”
“We abhor this senseless act of violence and urge the Government of Bangladesh in the strongest terms to apprehend the criminals behind these murders,” Marcia Stephens Bloom Bernicat, the U.S. ambassador to Bangladesh, said in the statement.
Mannan and someone described only as a friend were in a flat in Dhaka when five or six young men posing as couriers arrived at Mannan’s building under the guise of delivering a package to him, said Mohammad Iqbal, officer in charge of Kalabagan police station.
They entered the second-floor apartment and hacked Mannan and his friend to death with machetes, Iqbal said.
Additional details of the two deaths were not immediately available, but several media outlets reported that Mannan was the editor of Roopbaan, a Dhaka-based LGBT magazine that describes itself as “a platform and publication promoting human right and freedom to love in Bangladesh.”