Clashes erupted and transport and business was disrupted in Bangladesh yesterday after the main opposition party called a second strike in three days to protest at what it said was "barbaric" police action in the first strike.
The Awami League, the country's biggest opposition party, said in a statement nearly 100 of its members and supporters, including several senior leaders, were injured in the latest country-wide strike.
Witnesses said clashes erupted yesterday, a working day in Bangladesh, when baton-wielding police turned on stone-throwing protesters.
PHOTO: AFP
"The on-and-off-again battle is mostly concentrated around the Awami League central office at Gulistan, in the heart of the city," one witness said. Others said protesters had exploded some home-made bombs but no one was injured.
The strike was in protest against police action on Thursday, when the Awami League called a strike to mobilize support for its campaign to topple Prime Minister Begum Khaleda Zia and force early elections, which are otherwise not due before October 2006.
Awami League general secretary Abdul Jalil said "hundreds of our party leaders, including a former minister, and supporters were wounded in barbaric police actions during Thursday's strike."
The former minister, Saber Hossain Chowdhury, and several others were still in hospital, party leaders said yesterday.
In the capital Dhaka, hundreds of opposition activists took to the streets under the watchful eyes of hundreds of police and paramilitary troops, witnesses said.
The strike had affected Chittagong port and major towns across the country, reporters said. Most shops remained closed and schools suspended examinations. The Dhaka and Chittagong stock exchanges also remained shut.
On Friday night, suspected opposition supporters set fire to a bus and damaged four other vehicles in Dhaka, police said. No one was injured.
Awami chief Sheikh Hasina said while visiting the wounded in hospitals on Friday that the government had pushed the country "into unprecedented lawlessness, making killings, lootings and abductions rampant."
She urged the people to push Prime Minister Khaleda's more than two-year-old government out and make way for early elections.
Khaleda's Bangladesh Nationalist party (BNP) is expected to hold a rally in the capital later yesterday.
Khaleda has rejected calls for early polls, saying the country is making satisfactory progress on the economic and social fronts.
"The Awami League has a history of doing bad things and trying to retard progress and disrupt peace," BNP secretary-general Abdul Mannan Bhuiyan said on Friday.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
RSS