A U.S. Embassy worker was among two men killed 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.
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.”