Grieving widow Fatima Begum wept when hospital staff told her that her husband had died in the unrest that has been raging in Bangladesh for nearly a week. She wept again when hospital staff refused to hand over the body.
Islam is the majority religion in the South Asian country, where 155 people have been killed since Tuesday in clashes between student protesters and police over controversial civil service recruitment rules.
According to the customs of this religion, anyone who dies must be buried immediately.
But staff at one of the biggest hospitals in the capital Dhaka have long been required to hand over bodies to relatives only with police permission, and that is no longer easily possible.
“Where is my husband?” Begum, 40, shouted to staff outside the hospital morgue. “Give me his body.”
Begum’s husband, Kamal Miah, aged 45, made a hard living as a pedal-rickshaw driver, transporting people around a sprawling metropolis of 20 million for as little as a dollar a fare.
The family says he was not involved in any of the clashes that wreaked havoc in the city but was killed in police firing.
Begum and her two daughters were asked to go to the nearby police station. When her eldest daughter Anika went there, it was barricaded and locked.
Authorities had closed the station after protesters set fire to dozens of police posts.
Anika was then sent to another police station 10 kilometres (six miles) from the hospital – while a government curfew was in place across the country.
The police there refused to give the necessary permission to release the body.
Anika said, “My father was not a protester. Why did my father have to die?”
Tested to the limits
Miah was among more than 60 people who died during the unrest at Dhaka Medical College Hospital, the country’s largest healthcare facility located in the heart of the capital.
The hospital has been under immense pressure due to the ever-increasing number of patients since police action against protesters began.
An AFP correspondent at the scene said ambulances, private cars and rickshaws carrying the injured were arriving at an average of one a minute at a time.
The entrance to the emergency department, guarded by paramilitary Ansar forces, was stained with blood.
Staff rush in with stretchers and trolleys as soon as the injured are treated. Some of the injured are given first aid with rubber bullets, while others have to wait, sometimes for hours, for doctors on duty.
Some people are brought in already dead. As soon as the doctor or nurse officially confirms it, the loved ones burst into tears.
After the hospital ran out of blood stock, a group of volunteers stood near the emergency department using a loudspeaker to call for blood donors.
With dozens of grieving relatives gathered at the hospital, police action to suppress the student protests has sparked unbridled anger against the government of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina.
“Hasina’s police killed my son to keep her in power,” the father of a 30-year-old mobile phone shop owner who was shot dead in the capital, who asked not to be named, told AFP.
“God will punish him for this unjust torture.”
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)