Muhsin Hendricks, considered the world’s “first openly gay imam”, has been shot dead near the southern city of Gqeberha, South African police have said.

The imam, who ran a mosque intended as a safe haven for gay and other marginalised Muslims, was in a car with another person on Saturday when a vehicle stopped in front of them and blocked their exit, police said.

“Two unknown suspects with covered faces got out of the vehicle and started firing multiple shots at the vehicle,” the Eastern Cape force said in a statement.

“Thereafter they fled the scene, and the driver noticed that Hendricks, who was seated at the back of the vehicle was shot and killed.”

A police spokesperson confirmed to AFP the authenticity of a video on social media that purported to show a targeted killing in Bethelsdorp near Gqeberha, formerly known as Port Elizabeth.

“The motive for the murder is unknown and forms part of the ongoing investigation,” police said, urging anybody with information to come forward.

The International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association denounced the killing.

“The ILGA World family is in deep shock at the news of the murder of Muhsin Hendricks, and calls on authorities to thoroughly investigate what we fear may be a hate crime,” the executive director, Julia Ehrt, said in a statement.

Hendricks, involved in various LGBTQ+ advocacy groups, came out as gay in 1996. Two years later he started hosting meetings in his home city for LGBTQ+ Muslims, who treated him like their community imam. “I opened my garage, put a carpet down and invited people to have tea and talk,” he told the Guardian in 2022.

In 2011 Hendricks bolstered his role as an imam figure by setting up a mosque space after a friend endured a local sermon condemning homosexuality. “I said, ‘Maybe it’s time we started our own space, so people can pray without being judged’.”

He ran the Al-Ghurbaah mosque at Wynberg near his birthplace, Cape Town. The mosque provides “a safe space in which queer Muslims and marginalised women can practise Islam”, its website states.

Hendricks, the subject of a 2022 documentary called The Radical, had previously alluded to threats against him.

He told the Guardian he had been advised to hire bodyguards but said he never feared attacks and insisted that “the need to be authentic” was “greater than the fear to die”.

Hendricks, who had worked as an Arabic language teacher and fashion designer, was 29 when he came out to his mother. Born into a Muslim family, he married a woman, had children, then divorced before revealing his sexuality to his family, eight years after his father died.

South Africa has one of the world’s highest murder rates, with 28,000 murders in the year to February 2024, according to police data.