Most of those held are students from across the country

Bangladesh has arrested 29 people from an LGBT gathering here, a rare crackdown on gay men 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 those arrested, mostly students aged between 20-30 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 told PTI.

RAB’s duty officer Abdur Rashid said they were arrested as homosexuality was prohibited under law 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. adding: “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.”

Last year in April, Xulhaz Mannan, editor of Bangladesh’s only LGBT magazine, Roopbaan, was hacked to death at his Dhaka home along with a friend. The attack was later claimed by militant group Ansar al-Islam.