A Bangladeshi student group has vowed to resume protests that sparked a lethal police crackdown and nationwide unrest unless several of their leaders are released from custody yesterday.
Last week’s violence killed at least 205 people, an Agence France-Presse count of police and hospital data showed, in one of the biggest upheavals of Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s 15-year tenure.
Army patrols and a nationwide curfew remain in place more than a week after they were imposed, and a police dragnet has scooped up thousands of protesters including at least half a dozen student leaders.
Photo: EPA-EFE
Members of Students Against Discrimination, whose campaign against civil service job quotas precipitated the unrest, said they would end their week-long protest moratorium.
The group’s leader Nahid Islam and others “should be freed and the cases against them must be withdrawn,” Abdul Hannan Masud told reporters in an online briefing late on Saturday.
Masud, who did not disclose his location because he was in hiding from authorities, also demanded that “visible actions” be taken against government ministers and police officers responsible for the deaths of protesters.
“Otherwise, Students Against Discrimination will be forced to launch tough protests” from today, he said.
Islam and two other senior members of the protest group were on Friday forcibly discharged from hospital in the capital, Dhaka, and taken away by a group of plainclothes detectives.
Earlier last week, Islam said he was being treated at a hospital for injuries police inflicted on him during an earlier round of detention and said he was in fear for his life.
Bangladeshi Minister of Home Affairs Asaduzzaman Khan on Friday told reporters that the trio were taken into custody for their own safety, but did not confirm if they had been formally arrested.
Police yesterday said that detectives had taken two others into custody, while a Students Against Discrimination activist said that a third had been taken yesterday morning.
At least 9,000 people have been arrested nationwide since the unrest began, Bangladesh’s largest daily newspaper, Prothom Alo, reported.
While a curfew imposed on July 20 remains in effect, it had been progressively eased through last week, in a sign of the Hasina administration’s confidence that order was gradually being restored.
Bangladeshi Minister of State for Posts, Telecommunications and Information Technology Zunaid Ahmed Palak told reporters that the country’s mobile Internet network would be restored later yesterday, 11 days after a nationwide blackout imposed at the height of the unrest.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to
RSS