Crackdown on LGBT meet in Bangladesh, 29 arrested

Bangladesh has arrested 29 people from an LGBT gathering here, a rare crackdown on gays in the conservative Muslim-majority country where homosexuality is prohibited, officials said on Friday. The Rapid Action Battalion (RAB), an elite police unit that made the arrests, said the suspects, mostly students aged between 2030 years, had travelled from across the country and were picked up in the raid on Thursday.

“We arrested them along with drugs as they were partying at a community centre after midnight yesterday,” a RAB official familiar with the incident said.

RAB-10’s duty officer Abdur Rashid said they were arrested as homosexuality was prohibited under law in the Muslim-majority Bangladesh and they carried out the raids responding to complaints by residents in the neighbourhood.

“We, however, did not find them involved in sexual activities while they were partying. But we found contraband sex stimulating drugs from them,” the official said.

“We planned to accuse them under drug-related laws since they were not instantly found to be engaged in unnatural sexual activities at the scene,” he said.

Bangladesh’s penal code prescribes as high as life imprisonment for homosexuality describing it as “unnatural offence” and such activities are socially castigated.

“Whoever voluntarily has carnal intercourse against the order of nature with any man, woman or animal, shall be punished with 2 (imprisonment) for life, or with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to 10 years, and shall also be liable to fine,” the law reads.