Bangladesh arrests 29 gay men

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.