A statement from USAID, an American government agency for poverty prevention, identified the man as Xulhaz Mannan. "Today, USAID lost one of our own," it said.
"He was the kind of person willing to fight for what he believed in, someone ready to stand up for his own rights and the rights of others," USAID Administrator Gayle Smith said in a statement.
"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 a statement.
Mannan worked for the U.S. Embassy for eight years before joining USAID last September.
Attackers posed as couriers
Mannan and a man named by Amnesty International as Tanay Mojumdar were in a flat in Dhaka when five or six young men posing as couriers arrived under the guise of delivering a package, said Mohammad Iqbal, officer in charge of the Kalabagan police station.
The attackers entered the second-floor apartment and hacked Mannan and Mojumdar to death with machetes, Iqbal said. Mannan's mother and a maid were also in the flat at the time, he said. Both are alive.
"The brutal killing today of an editor of an LGBTI publication and his friend, days after a university professor was hacked to death, underscores the appalling lack of protection being afforded to a range of peaceful activists in the country," said Champa Patel, Amnesty International's South Asia director.
Mannan was the editor of Roopbaan, a Dhaka-based LGBT magazine that describes itself as "a platform and publication promoting human rights and freedom to love in Bangladesh."
The Roopbaan team had been receiving threats from various Islamist pages on Facebook for some time, said Boys of Bangladesh, the country's largest gay rights group. Mannan had been a prominent member of Boys of Bangladesh since 2005 and many of its leading activists have been living in fear, it added.
Second hacking death this week
Rajshahi police Commissioner Mohammad Shamsuddin said the student wasn't charged and it remained unclear why Siddique had been stabbed in the neck as he awaited a bus to take him to campus Saturday.
"He was neither a blogger nor an anti-Islamic campaigner, but the pattern of the murder indicates Islamist militants involved in the recent spate of killings of secular bloggers might have a link," Shamsuddin said.
ISIS claimed responsibility for Siddique's death, saying he was slain "for calling to atheism." CNN could not independently confirm either the terror outfit's claim or Siddique's religious beliefs.
Extremists have 'hit list'
"Let Bangladesh revoke the citizenship of these enemies of Islam," a statement accompanying the list says. "If not, we will hunt them down in whatever part of God's world we find them and kill them right there."
Amnesty alleges that Bangladesh authorities have done little to discourage such attacks. Exiled lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender activists told the watchdog group that when they attempted to report threats to authorities, police responded by warning them they could be charged with "unnatural offenses."
Rather than offer security, Amnesty said, police have warned LGBT activists to be "less provocative."
"While the Bangladeshi authorities have failed to bring these violent groups to justice, the attackers have expanded their range of targets to now include a university professor and LGBTI activists," Patel said.
Ravi Agrawal, Holly Yan, Deborah Bloom, Bijan Hosseini, Serenitie Wang, Farid Ahmed and Tiffany Ap contributed to this report.
Source → Bangladeshi LGBT editor among 2 men hacked to death
