  The recent discovery of a faint gamma-ray burst (GRB) coincident with the
gravitational wave (GW) event GW 170817 revealed the existence of a population
of low-luminosity short duration gamma-ray transients produced by neutron star
mergers in the nearby Universe. These events could be routinely detected by
existing gamma-ray monitors, yet previous observations failed to identify them
without the aid of GW triggers. Here we show that GRB150101B was an analogue of
GRB170817A located at a cosmological distance. GRB 150101B was a faint short
duration GRB characterized by a bright optical counterpart and a long-lived
X-ray afterglow. These properties are unusual for standard short GRBs and are
instead consistent with an explosion viewed off-axis: the optical light is
produced by a luminous kilonova component, while the observed X-rays trace the
GRB afterglow viewed at an angle of ~13 degrees. Our findings suggest that
these properties could be common among future electromagnetic counterparts of
GW sources.
