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The group’s leader Nahid Islam and others “should be freed and the cases against them must be withdrawn,” Abdul Hannan Masud told reporters in an online briefing late on Saturday.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.
Drug lord Jose Adolfo Macias Villamar, alias “Fito,” was Ecuador’s most-wanted fugitive before his arrest on Wednesday, more than a year after he escaped prison from where he commanded the country’s leading criminal gang. The former taxi driver turned crime boss became the prime target of law enforcement early last year after escaping from a prison in the southwestern port of Guayaquil. Ecuadoran President Daniel Noboa’s government released “wanted” posters with images of his face and offered US$1 million for information leading to his capture. In a country plagued by crime, members of Fito’s gang, Los Choneros, have responded with violence, using car
Two former Chilean ministers are among four candidates competing this weekend for the presidential nomination of the left ahead of November elections dominated by rising levels of violent crime. More than 15 million voters are eligible to choose today between former minister of labor Jeannette Jara, former minister of the interior Carolina Toha and two members of parliament, Gonzalo Winter and Jaime Mulet, to represent the left against a resurgent right. The primary is open to members of the parties within Chilean President Gabriel Boric’s ruling left-wing coalition and other voters who are not affiliated with specific parties. A recent poll by the
TENSIONS HIGH: For more than half a year, students have organized protests around the country, while the Serbian presaident said they are part of a foreign plot About 140,000 protesters rallied in Belgrade, the largest turnout over the past few months, as student-led demonstrations mount pressure on the populist government to call early elections. The rally was one of the largest in more than half a year student-led actions, which began in November last year after the roof of a train station collapsed in the northern city of Novi Sad, killing 16 people — a tragedy widely blamed on entrenched corruption. On Saturday, a sea of protesters filled Belgrade’s largest square and poured into several surrounding streets. The independent protest monitor Archive of Public Gatherings estimated the
Irish-language rap group Kneecap on Saturday gave an impassioned performance for tens of thousands of fans at the Glastonbury Festival despite criticism by British politicians and a terror charge for one of the trio. Liam Og O hAnnaidh, who performs under the stage name Mo Chara, has been charged under the UK’s Terrorism Act with supporting a proscribed organization for allegedly waving a Hezbollah flag at a concert in London in November last year. The rapper, who was charged under the anglicized version of his name, Liam O’Hanna, is on unconditional bail before a further court hearing in August. “Glastonbury,
RSS