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The group’s leader Nahid Islam and others “should be freed and the cases against them must be withdrawn,” Abdul Hannan Masud told reporters in an online briefing late on Saturday.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.
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